Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren vocal Bomb here. It's not often that you look at an animal and think, I bet all the goth kids wish they had a chicken like that. Meet the Ayam Chamani, the Peter Murphy or Robert Smith or Lydia Diets or Darth Vader of chickens, pick your pop culture reference. All visible parts of this chicken's exterior feathers, beak, tongue, comb, and talons are black, and it would seem as if
the darkness should end there, but not so. It's inky exterior is just a teaser for the darkness within. It turns out the bones, organs, and muscles of the i M Chamani are all black as well, which, in addition to their rarity, explains why these birds are so popular amongst chicken aficionados. They're also dubbed the Lamborghini of poultry because the going price for these guys can range between two hundred dollars for a single egg layer hen and
five thousand dollars for a full grown mating pair. Native to the Indonesian island of Java, the i Am Chimani has been used in rituals and kept as status pets by the elite. Four centuries they were thought to have black, enchanted blood that could lift curses or heal ailments, and strangely enough, the blood is one of the only obviously normally pigmented things about these birds, aside from their cream
colored eggs. But when you look at an i Am chamani, the superstitions around its being magicals seem completely rational, because this chicken is gorgeous in the sunlight. Their plumage isn't matte black like a charcoal briquette, It's iridescent like a Hubble telescope rendering of a nebula in deep space. Like looking into the most hypnotic oil covered petal in the mall parking lot. These chickens are complete knockouts. But why what could possibly cause a chicken's flesh and bones to
appear to have been pickled? In India ink. It turns out i Am Chimani is the world's most extreme example of a condition called dermal hyperpigmentation or fibro melanosis. Three other chicken varieties have this condition to varying degrees. The silky bantam, the Vietnamese kamong and the Swedish swart Juna, and I couldn't find pronunciations on those last two. I
hope I didn't butcher them too terribly. Research published revealed that this genetic condition causes strange behavior in chicken embryos. Precursors to melanocytes, which are the cells that produce the pigment melanin, the same pigment that gives our human hair, eyes,
and skin dark color. Usually, the precursors to melanocytes in chicken embryos wind up in just the skin and eyes of the developing birds, But in chickens with fibro melanosis, those precursors travel throughout all the tissues of the embryo, and what's more, they don't shut down at the usual stage. Instead, they continue to multiply, creating way more melanocytes than usual, which leads to the hyperpigmentation that we see in these
birds once they hatch. Strangely enough, scientists believe that the mutation that leads to fibro mellanosis and chickens is so unusual that it most likely happened only once in a single bird that lived thousands of years ago. No one knows how the gene transfers to the globe from one jet black Bird, but Marco Polo wrote in twelve about black boned chickens while he was traveling in Asia, so the gene probably made its way around the world via
trade roots. Interestingly, even though the flesh of the i Am Chamani looks strange, it reportedly tastes just like chicken. Today's episode was by Jescelin Shields and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more on this and months of other well picked topics, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com and for more podcast for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or where every listen to your favorite shows.