The earliest fossil record of Meleagris gallopavo comes from the southwestern US, about 50,000 years ago. Male turkeys are called gobblers and females are called hens. The weight record for an Eastern gobbler is 27.5 pounds. The first thing we notice about a turkey is its feathers. Feathers are mostly made of a protein called keratin.
Turkey feathers get their colors from pigments.
The tips of the breast feathers are white in hens and black in gobblers, accounting for the gobbler's darker appearance. In the graphs below, the letters V, B, G, Y, O, and R stand for violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. The head of a gobbler turns bright red when the bird is excited and the skin of the head is full of blood, but the head skin fades to pale blue if the bird is frightened and blood drains out of it. Normal gobblers have the male plumage described above. If a young hen has her ovaries removed, she also grows male plumage.