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

[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.

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.

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.

Reg-free link

[imag0]

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

Four winged freaks!

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:Oh god...

[robbyjo]

...Jurassic Park 4...

I heard that the main villain is a huge troll dancing like a monkey and scream: "Developers! Developers! Developers!".

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.

No name yet?

[BrianWCarver]

None of the articles gave a name for this thing yet.

So, here we have it...

Slashdot's own Name that New Dinosaur Contest:

1. Glideasaurus
2. GNAB (GNAB's not a bird)
3. Quadrofoil
4. I don't have a name yet you Insensitive Clodasaurus.
5. Fakeoraptor
6. Cowboydactyl Nealasaurus.

BWC

Re:Four Wings and Dolphins...

[iainl]

This isn't about doubting the Chinese ability to perform genuine science - the problem is the well documented ability of Chinese fossil smugglers to invent new fake fossils in order to make large quantities of cash.

Re:This is not sience

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, I'll byte. Once good AC deserves another, and I'm bored...

The key behind 'science' is the ability to test. You come up with a theory, and there will be some way, even if only hypothetically, that the theory can be proven wrong. A theory is not widely considered to be true until it is proven, but more theories can be based on it under the presumption that it is (sorta like read-ahead caching)

The key here is that it's always possible that it's wrong. This is called falsifiability. Something cannot be true unless it's possible to think of a way that is might be false. It sounds like a paradox, but the idea is that the theory will hold against any evidence brought against it, even when that evidence is thought to prove it wrong.

Religion is not falsifiable, unless you can give me a reasonable test that could prove God does not exist (and this prove the "theory" wrong)... which I assume is the root of your argument: That evolution is false because God created everything.

As for evolution being testable, some people are doing a great job of it. So far the theory has held up as expected.

And let's not forget the unintentional proofs, like antibiotic resistant bacteria

Just because your pet cat never give birth to a litter of dogs is not exactly reason to say evolution is bunk. Maybe if you understood the concept and the theory a little better you wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it.
--

how does this thing walk around ?

[heymjo]

I can understand the microraptor would've folded his front wings onto its chest or something , like normal birds do when they aren't flying. But if your feet act as wings as well then it cannot be comfortable walking around with those. What if they get muddy or wet ?
There are birdspecies nowadays with feathered legs and the feathers on them look all battered, muddy and broken, definitely unsuitable to fly around with.

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.

4 - Winged Dinosaur a Mistake

[Blnky]

Update: 6:30 AM, Scientists determine that the original analysis was erroneous and that it is, in fact, two separate winged dinosaurs on top of each other. This reassessment was prompted when archeological interns in the field discovered a fossilized truck with fossilized skid marks approximately 30 meters away.

Big pictures of it

[acomj]

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

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.