3 . 阅读下面短文，在空白处填入1个适当的单词或括号内单词的正确形式。
Hatching a theory
Just as dinosaurs characterized the cretaceous (白垩纪的) period, which ended with their extinction 66 million years ago, and mammals made up the Holocene (全新纪), which extends to the present day, many scientists believe we need to designate a new geologic age, called the Anthropocene, 1 reflects the impact of humankind on the planet. That raises the question: What will constitute 2 (noticeable) feature of the Anthropocene in the fossil record?
It’s likely to be chicken bones, according to a study by Carys Bennett, from the U.K.’s University of Leicester, and colleagues 3 (publish) last month in Royal Society Open Science.
Humans eat a lot of chicken, which means a lot of chicken bones are being buried, and many of them are likely to survive in fossilized form. According to Bennett’s paper, 65.8 billion chickens were killed globally in 2016, and 4 22.7 billion live birds await this fate today. The “biomass” of all poultry is 10 times greater than of all wild birds 5 (put) together.
We’re not just eating a lot of poultry; we’ve also put our mark on the birds themselves. 6 chicken consumption started taking off in the 1950s, the size and shape of the species—their skeleton, bone chemistry and genetics—have changed completely from their wild ancestors. The rapid growth of chicken’s leg and breast muscle means that its organs, including the heart and liver, are proportionally smaller. We 7 (shorten) the life span of broiler chickens, which can no longer survive without “intensive human intervention,” the authors write.
Because we engineered the species, and because it has become such a major feature of food consumption, it will 8 (consider) a marker of the Anthropocene, Bennett predicts. “The significance of the post-mid-20th-century chicken is that it is the first really good example we have 9 what paleontologists (古生物学家) call a new “morphospecies”—that is, a distinctive kind of skeleton that 10 be identified as a fossil—that appeared in the Anthropocene and became hugely abundant pretty well around the world,” she says. “In the future, humans will find and use chickens as a marker of our age.”
