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

take this with a grain of salt

[davejenkins]

There was an excellent documentary on the BBC last summer that showed the elaborate lengths to which the Chinese fraud industry will go to fake a winged fossil.

The fraud detailed in the show fooled even National Geographic, which had spent thousands on research, documentation, and 'verification' by palaentologists.

I bet $20 this one turns out to be a fake.

Re:take this with a grain of salt

[elmegil]

Peer reviewers or not, when I heard this described on NPR last night, they commented that "usually fossils come out in fragments and are very difficult to piece together. These came out very whole, and amazingly detailed, down to all the feathers details." That just screams fraud to me.

bambiraptor

[danamania]

Speaking of microraptors, the bambiraptor is a cutesy-named microraptor.

One terrifying dinosaur... if you're a small cat, or a toy poodle.

Re:how does this thing walk around ?

[cyrek]

Evolution tends to follow similar paths in similar situations.

The article suggests that the Microraptors might have 'flown' like flying squirrels do. Since the squirrels have no problems getting around, I guess the 'raptors had no trouble.

Mammals have developed two forms of flight - the modified hand as a wing in Bats and the three flaps of skin between limbs used by some Squirrels.

It stands to reason to assume that if Birds today use the modified hand method, that there might have been some other dinosaur subspecies that used the other method.

Does evolution work in a direction? No.

[ianscot]

The suggestion is that dinosaurs went through a gliding stage before learning to fly with two fore-limbs, says Dr Angela Milner of London's Natural History Museum.

This sort of quote assumes that evolution is going in a single direction -- "from" flightless dinos "to" modern birds. In fact traits commonly appear, and disappear, and reappear, many times. (Take a look at a "terror bird" and convince yourself birds weren't turning back into dinosaurs.)

It sounds like the world had a mess of different uses for feathers, once they developed -- insulatory, locomotion, display, and so on, just like in modern birds, and some we haven't thought of like this four-legged gliding model, if the fossil's real. Dinosaurs didn't develop "toward" flight, they bounced all over that range of feather uses just like birds do today.

Cladistics will air out that sort of thinking real fast. (Decent practical primer/pop science book: "In Search of Deep Time.")

Looking at things in "clades" also helps in practical ways by showing the evolutionary relationships between living animals more clearly. People trying to figure out ways to treat tapeworms had trouble making progress under the assumption that their on parasitism evolved only once, in a common anscestor of all modern tapeworms. Cladistics hashed out the evolutionary history of tapeworms a bit, and we realized the trait had a more patchy history -- parasitism had evolved several separate times -- and that some of the closest modern relations weren't parasitic at all. Those modern relations were easier to work with in the lab than something that required a host.

Re:This proves, once and for all...

[Bicoid]

There are still arguments as to whether -ANY- of the fossils with "feathers" found are genuine, whether the feathers are merely scales that fossilised, or whether (even if they were feathers) they were even used, and were merely a genetic anomoly that died out.

You need desperately to stop reading Feduccia and believing everything he says as undeniable truth. The guy does piss-poor paleontology (ask any paleontologist and they'll tell you the same thing). He doesn't even publish in peer-reviewed papers...he writes books which are NOT peer reviewed. As far as I'm concerned, HE'S the fraud.

But about the feathered dinosaurs. The whole "scales or connective tissue" argument is long-dead. That argument was used against Sinosauropteryx because the only feathers it had was a small amount of "dinofuzz." Dinofuzz has not been proven to be feathers, but it seems likely that it is indeed protofeathers. Since Sinosauropteryx, however, we've found MANY more feathered dinosaurs, many of which indeed have true feathers. Some of these have been found by paleontologists as opposed to villiagers and are therefore unaltered. Microscopic analysis of the feathers shows a LOT of detail in structures that we find in the feathers found in, say, Confucisornis and other birds found in the Liaoning beds.

The infamous Archaeoraptor debacle was NOT as big a problem as you would think. There were two seperate animals stuck together...a composite specimen made up of a bird and a Microraptor. The guy who found it AT A ROCK AND GEM SHOW(who was NOT, I repeat, NOT a paleontologist but rather a dinosaur fanatic who wanted his name on a paper) took it straight to National Geographic and had all sorts of stuff done with it LONG before the whole thing was even looked at in more detail. This was a result of bad science, not the convincing value of the composites/fakes coming out of China.

Another problem is scientists speaking outside their fields of expertise. Geologists have no business speculating on the nature of flight, with the SOLE exception of when they can produce a complete physical replica and can carry out hard science on that replica.

No offense or anything, but you, sir, are an ignorant fool. Most paleontologists are NOT trained primarily in geology. Many have specialized in comparative anatomy, developmental biology, and other areas that are more important to understanding the morphology of the animals they study. I've even met a few paleontologists who DO have a good background in aerodynamics or structural engineering so they can understand what the animals they're looking at could and could not do. Don't think all paleontologists are geologists who pick up fossils, name them, and make up unfounded stories as to the animal's behavior.