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2001 

April 25, 2001  American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York,  United States China On Display at AMNH beginning  April 25, 2001. End date not known. Probably no sooner than May 25, 2001. Nature Magazine Paper by Ji Qiang, Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences and Mark Norell, Chairman of the Division of Paleontology at the AMNH Page 1  2  Resources High Resolulution Photos These are LARGE photo files that may take several minutes to load.  1 - Top Left 2 - Top Right 3 - Bottom Left 4 - Bottom Right

Did those feathers tickle or what? First complete specimen of a feather-covered dinosaur that couldn't fly  unveiled at American Museum of Natural History in New York City. With feather boas a big fashion thing this year, along comes a little dino guy who grew his own fluff about 135 million years ago in the Late Jurassic or Early Cretaceous!  This fossil dromeosaur (a small, fast-running theropod dinosaur related to the Velociraptors who are always eating the bad guys in Jurassic Park ) is the first dinosaur found with its entire body covering intact.The covering appears to be downy fluff and primitive feathers.  It is the best evidence yet that animals developed feathers to keep warm -- before they ever learned to fly. For a long, long time, paleontologists have searched for an actual, complete fossil of a dinosaur completely covered with feathers. Thanks to a group of farmers in northeastern China's Liaoning Province, one was discovered about a year ago. It has taken all this time to study the specimen and to write a paper which describes it for the science journal Nature. Because the animal has a very large head in comparison to its body, Dr.Mark Norell of the AMNH thinks it is a juvenile. (There were no video games found, however, so it remains to be seen). The "dino-bird" looks a little bit like a large duck with a long tail. This is the Downy Dino Dude still in the matrix.  We think he looks a lot like Steve Martin singing King Tut. One reason the new dinosaur does not have an official name yet is that it might be a young version of a dinosaur (like Microraptor, found in China near the new fossil in 2000 or Sinornithosaurus, found in China in 1999, for example) that we already know about. That black stuff on the head just in front of the eyes is fluffy down. Notice those nasty little teeth?  We wouldn't want to try to pluck any of the down to stuff a pillow with. The head and tail are covered with downy fibers. Other parts of the body have tufts of filaments resembling primitive feathers. This down is on the top of the dino-bird's head. It is all matted together because of the pressure on the fossil over millions of years. This is a tuft of ostrich feather from a modern feather boa.  Looks alot like the dino down, doesn't it?  Hmmm. How much would a dino-down pillow be, do you think? Along the back of the animal's arms are branching structures that have "barbs" like the feathers of a modern bird. Mick Ellison, the artist who drew a picture of what this downy dino dude may have looked like, used chicken feathers to represent the fossil feathers when he made a clay model for reference. This fossil is so clean and complete, that Dr. Norrell and Ji Qiang (who first examined the fossil in China) can see how the feathers were attached to the dinosaur's body. Previous specimens were incomplete or mixed up. That led critics (who don't believe that theropod dinosaurs evolved into modern birds) to say that the older fossils were just pieces of dinosaurs and birds mushed up together.   Ji Qiang and Mark Norell are holding up this wall to keep it from falling over.  But seriously folks, this is a typical deposit of fossil bearing rocks from the Yixian Formation. But theropod dinosaurs and modern birds "share more than 100 anatomical features, including a wishbone, swiveling wrists, and three forward-pointing toes." Nonetheless, a small number of scientists think that birds came from a different, still unknown, reptile much older than the super-fast dromaeosaurs which look so much like the birds of today. It is possible that young dinosaurs including baby T. rex may have had a downy, feather like covering to keep them warm. Dr. Norell thinks that because modern birds are warm-blooded and need feathers to stay warm, it is "a reasonable idea...that non-avian (non-flying) dinosaurs developed primitive feathers at the same time that they developed warm-bloodedness."

More.... Finding the dinosaur...  Page 1  2   Resources

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Entire Contents (c) 2001  Edward Summer, All Rights Reserved
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created 04/22/201
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