Chicken
Featured in: Year 2: Animals, including humans
Chicken
Bird
A chicken's life starts inside a hard-shelled egg.
The stages are:
A mother hen lays an egg and keeps it warm by sitting on it. A baby chick hatches out by pecking a hole in the shell. The chick grows bigger, loses its fluffy yellow feathers, and grows adult feathers to become a chicken.
💡 Fun Facts
- A hen can lay about one egg every day.
- A baby chick has a special 'egg tooth' on the end of its beak to help it break out of the shell, which falls off a day or two later.
- A male adult chicken is called a rooster and is known for his loud "cock-a-doodle-doo!" crow in the morning.
Name Story
Gallus gallus
means “Cockerel — and 'a person from Gaul'”
What does its name mean?
- Gallus — cockerelLatin
- gallus — the same word — it also means 'a Gaul', a person from ancient Gaul (roughly modern France)Latin
In Latin the one word 'gallus' means both 'cockerel' and 'a person from Gaul' — a happy accident that is exactly why the rooster became the proud national symbol of France.