Friday - September 16, 2011

Changing Your Perceptions

While Peiper enjoys a bit of vacation, I’ll do what I can to run a few stories from Europe and the UK. “Enjoys” might be a bit sarcastic - he emailed me that the flight out was exhausting, and a big hassle with INS and airport security. Funny how some of these stories from Over There are really about things happening Over Here, but our news tends to be awfully thinned out; a lot of the interesting bits get lost along the way.

Dinosaur feathers found in amber

In science fiction, amber preserved the DNA that allowed rebirth of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. In real life, amber preserved feathers that provide a new image of what dinosaurs looked like.

“Now, instead of scaly animals portrayed as usually drab creatures, we have solid evidence for a fluffy coloured past,,” reports Mark A. Norell of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Examples of ancient feathers ranging from the simple to the complex are now being studied. They were preserved in amber found in western Canada, researchers led by Ryan C. McKellar of the University of Alberta report in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

Amber, hardened tree resin, preserved a mixture of feathers from 70 million years ago. Other feathers contained in amber dating to 90 million years ago are less diverse.

Specimens include simple filament structures similar to the earliest feathers of non-flying dinosaurs – a form unknown in modern birds – and more complicated bird feathers “displaying pigmentation and adaptations for flight and diving,” the researchers reported.

Indications of feathers have been found on much older fossils, and the new discoveries indicate feathers continued to develop into modern form before the extinction of dinosaurs, explained Norell, who was not part of the research team.

A separate report by Roy A. Wogelius of the University of Manchester, England, published online June 30 by Science, reports the finding of trace metals in feather fossils, suggesting their colours included black, brown and a reddish-brown.

“Despite many reports over the past decade of feathered dinosaurs and new birds from China, only now are we beginning to understand just how diverse feather types were” millions of years ago, Norell said.

Well imagine that! Big pink fluffy tyrannosaurus rexes, all cute and fuzzy, 10 tons of mobile mayhem stomping through the primordial forests looking to bite your head off. But happily! That’s going to take a bit of mental image adjustment.

Something to think about: 70 million years ago was practically yesterday in dinosaur terms, being darn close to the end of their run. Birds are believed to have been around for as much as 150 million years, so go figure. Here’s a bit more, a short paper with pictures on dino-birdies that does note that feathers were around before birds were, on critters known as coelurosaurian theropods.

Posted by Drew458     on 09/16/2011 at 11:48 AM   
Filed Under: • Animals • Archeology / Anthropology •  
• Comments (3) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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