Neopteryx is a monumental sculpture by Andreas Greiner, Takafumi Tsukamoto, and Diogo D. C. Vale. The work was realized as part of a Kunst am Bau commission for the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institute in Mecklenhorst, developed between 2021 and 2025.

The sculpture draws inspiration from the fossil of Archaeopteryx (the Berlin specimen) discovered near Eichstätt in 1874. Yet attentive viewers will notice that the bones of Neopteryx do not belong to a dinosaur at all, but to a modern, industrially produced chicken—specifically the Ross 308 breed. This chicken has been aggressively selected for hyper-rapid growth, reaching slaughter weight in as little as five weeks. Its body is engineered to produce maximum breast meat, while its skeleton, heart, and lungs often struggle to keep pace with this forced acceleration. The Ross 308 is an organism shaped almost entirely by human demand, incapable of surviving a normal lifespan under its own weight.

The work stands as a monument to this “newest bird species,” created by humans for consumption, and to the era in which our own species has come to shape, distort, and burden the planet’s geology and ecology: the Anthropocene.

Photo credit: Roland Bolz
With special thanks to Rachel Horsman