Chicken is by far the most widely used bird in animal breeding and is also a model organism that has long been used for scientific observations, typically in embryology. This position at the crossroads of the breeding industry and of basic research is part of the reasons for which chicken was amongst the first vertebrates sequenced at the dawn of the era of large genomes analyses, with a draft genome published only three years after the human one. The other reasons were that it was the only representative of the bird lineage at the time having available genomics resources such as genetic maps or large-insert DNA libraries. Just like a lot of the understanding of bird biology stemmed from using chicken as model, new insights into the specificities of bird genomes, such as the karyotype organization into macrochromosomes and microchromosomes, could be investigated in great detail. Since then, largely due to the advent of the second-generation parallel sequencing and third-generation long-read methods, more bird species were sequenced and at the time of writing, 163 assemblies are available with various levels of quality in the NCBI genome database. These include other birds bred as agricultural species, such as turkey, duck, quail or guinea fowl. In animal breeding, the genomic information is mainly used for QTL detection, marker-assisted or genomic selection and for a deeper understanding of biological mechanisms. Also, much had been done in poultry, to take advantage of the large collection of phenotypic variants present either in commercial or in fancy breeds. For instance, a number of genes causing coloration and ornamental variation were identified first in chicken, thanks for all the genomics tools available, and later on in other species, usually and in the absence of a reference genome, by directly testing the candidate genes found in chicken. With the advent of high quality and low-cost sequencing, the number of available genomes will expand rapidly and their quality will increase. However, does this mean model organisms will not be needed anymore?