4-Winged Dinosaur Fossil Found

Anonymous Coward writes "Scientists in China say they have found fossilized remains of a dinosaur with four feathered wings that it probably used for gliding, a find they say strengthens the theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs. See the story on CNN or BBC with a cool rendering of what it possibly looked like or at NYTimes (yadda)."

Comments

Reg-free link

[imag0]

Fly over here, you bastards and get your reg-free link

Four winged freaks!

Re:take this with a grain of salt

[gene_tailor]

Well, I'm not a fossil expert but the peer reviewers for Nature are buying this one.... or should I say six... Supposedly there are 6 different skeletons of this new species and the find is being published by Nature. See the 'news and views' from Nature here ; the data is here but I think people without subscriptions may not be able to see it. Time will tell.

For the German speakers

[Wirr]

here is a link to the article in German from "Der Spiegel":
The article

Link to BBC story about earlier fake

[MrMickS]

The BBC has a story about an earlier chinese fake here or here for text browsers.

Big pictures of it

[acomj]

National Geographic has some good big pictures / illustrations of it.

Re:take this with a grain of salt

[j_w_d]

Fossils come in all kinds of states. The condition depends pretty much on the geological history of the region in which the deposit was located, the nature of the burial environment and post-burial events (insects and scavenging animals working the corpse). Having an NPR talking-head make an asinine statment like "fossils are very difficult to put together" screams "media meister with foot-in-mouth disease" to me. Besides which, anyone can look at the images on the Nature site and see that the fossil in question IS in several pieces.

The difficulty in assembling a fossil is USUALLY associated with the obstacles that size and disarticulation place on the "interpretation" of the skeleton. You have all, or at least a lot of the bones of a monstrous therapod, but there are two-hundred odd not counting fragments, all laid out on the museum's curation room floor. How do you relate them? Do you have sufficient skeletal material to make informed reconstructions of missing parts? Do you even know what you are doing?

One famous incidence of this problem was a nineteenth century reconstruction of a Brontosaurid. The lead scientist worked from living reptiles and decided the posture would look like a monstrous crocodilian or monitor lizard (hey it was a reptile after all) with the legs out to the sides and the belly on or near the ground. He was congratualated by a colleague for successfully showing why dinosaurs became extinct - they died from the pain of those disarticulated joints. I think this little contrempts may be described in *The Hotblooded Dinosaurs* if you want to read about it.

If you compare this with the Chinese find, the animal is much smaller, only a meter long. Consequently, the find can be removed in a few small pieces, rather than excavating indvidual bones and bring round the pickup. The skeleton is articulated so well that all the bones are in situ. Scarcely any assembly is required.

If you compare the quality and detail of the skeleton, it is quite similar to finds made in parts Europe, and about which there was an article in National Geographic a few years back. The archaeopteryx was in similar condition and quality when it was discovered at a European site. The European and presumably the Chinese sites are in very fine grained shale or mudstone that has under gone minimal deformation. The bodies were buried quickly and the environment was anaerobic so that decay was slow and sufficiently incomplete to leave stains associated with trace impressions from the feathers. In other areas, notably in South America casts of dinosaur skin have been recovered. Pterosuars have been discovered so well preserved that what appears to be fur or fur- like feathers is visible.

One other thought. In paleontology, archaeology, and related professions, fraud has often been screamed because someone's favorite ox (theory, religious belief, doctrine, etc.) had been gored by an unanticipated discovery.