Owner Comments:
After the ferocity of the Marabou Stork and the Golden Eagle, it's a nice time to change direction and take a look at a gentler modern dinosaur. The Red Junglefowl (Species name Gallus gallus) brings us to what is and is likely to remain the most adorable dinosaur coin ever made and my favorite dinosaur coin in my whole collection.
The Red Junglefowl is a tropical fowl, native to Southeast Asia. There are 6 different subspecies of the Red Junglefowl, five of which range wild across their Southeast Asian range. As for the sixth...that's covered at the end of this essay. Unlike some other species, the Red Junglefowl is a very vocal bird, with different vocalizations for food, attracting a mate, and warning other Red Junglefowl to the appearance of predators. Red Junglefowl are gregarious animals that live together in flocks with a distinct "pecking order" with some members of the flock dominating the others. These dominant fowl get first access to food, water and other resources. Adding members to a flock of Red Junglefowl disrupts this established order and often leads to violence in the flock as the pecking order is re-established.
Red Junglefowl also exhibit sexual dimorphism. Males are usually larger and have longer tail feathers along with larger combs and wattles. Males are also more vibrantly and brightly colored than females as well. Males also have spurs on their legs, which they use for fighting other males over females and in defending their territory.
Unlike the previous dinosaurs in this collection, who are altricial and have young who are born helpless, Red Junglefowl are precocial, where the chicks are born ready to walk and interact with the environment on their own in a manner of hours. Though they are precocial, the chicks still require parental care and guidance for several weeks after hatching. And, as you can see from the coin, they are still all fuzzy and absolutely adorable! In contrast to the Golden Eagle, who are highly monogamous, Red Junglefowl are polygynous, with one or two males mating with several females in the flock. This strategy leads to high genetic diversity among the flocks.
Dietwise, Red Junglefowl are omnivorous, eating plant material, seeds, insects and small vertebrates such as mice and lizards. Their predators include birds of prey, large snakes and crocodilians and mammalian predators, including humans.
The coin itself is a departure from the other coins in that it shows a baby Red Junglefowl rather than a full grown example. Isn't he adorable? I think it's important to try to show dinosaur depictions from all life stages in this set as it is all part of the story......and fuzzy baby dinosaurs are just so cute!!!
The Red Junglefowl also holds an important place in human life and history. It is the wild ancestor of a very common modern dinosaur....the domestic chicken. The fact that this sweet little baby rooster appears on this coin is a testament to the place that the Red Junglefowl's domesticated descendant has played in human history. It found its way into the Chinese Zodiac as one of the most noble signs. However, it is important to note that the chicken exhibits some very different behaviors and is much less intelligent than the Red Junglefowl due to inbreeding by humans during the domestication process. For the purposes of this set, I decided that the Red Junglefowl is the right bird to discuss with this sweet baby rooster coin as it is the original model that nature and evolution intended and not the one that we ruined to serve our own purposes.....and in case you were wondering, no, I do not eat chicken :)