Dinosaur Feathers Found In Amber

An anonymous reader writes "A stunning array of prehistoric feathers, including dinosaur protofeathers, has been discovered in Late Cretaceous amber from Canada. 'Protofeathers aren't known from any modern, existing groups of birds and therefore the most obvious interpretation is that they belong to dinosaurs,' said University of Alberta professor, Alexander P. Wolfe. The 78 to 79-million-year-old amber preserved the feathers in vivid detail, including some of their diverse colors."

Comments

Yes!

[xstonedogx]

Can't wait for Jurassic Farms. *licks chops*

Re:Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Won't it just taste like chicken?

Technically chicken tastes like dinosaur.

So Many Missing Links to Choose From

[ideonexus]

What's really neat is that there are now so many dinosaur/bird hybrid fossils that we don't know which one is the direct ancestor of modern birds. There are just too many candidates for the missing link.

The really funny is that the Creationists are spinning the overwhelming abundance of missing links to mean that none of them are missing the link.

Re:So Many Missing Links to Choose From

[Anonymous Coward]

It's even more hilarious if you look at what was known, say, 20 years ago, before the recent discoveries and compare it to what has been found to date. Sure, since the late 1800s we had Archaeopteryx from the Late Jurassic with its odd combination of dinosaur-like features (teeth, claws, long bony tail) and flight feathers. Ignore the feathers and it looked an awful lot like a small Velociraptor-like dinosaur. Anti-evolutionary creationists mostly said it was a bird, although they weren't entirely consistent and sometimes called it a reptile. You could try to say that birds and dinosaurs were still different creatures, if you danced around some of the peculiar features of Archaeopteryx (any way you slice it, it was either a VERY weird bird or a VERY weird dinosaur). They also tried and failed to scientifically show that the feathers preserved on it weren't real.

Then in the 1990s dinosaurs with feather-like hairy structures turned up ( Sinosauropteryx ), then long-legged and obviously not flying dinosaurs with pretty clear flightless-bird-style feathers (e.g., Caudipteryx ), then Microraptor with asymmetric *flight* feathers on its arms AND legs (the "four-winged dinosaur") and which experiments have shown could probably glide. It still had teeth, Velociraptor-like claws and a long, dinosaur-like tail. Then the complaint was "but these are all younger than Archaeopteryx" (Early Cretaceous), which is true, but given the rarity of these sorts of fossils it's statistically unlikely that you will find them at the very first point they ever existed. Then Anchiornis turned up in the Late Jurassic anyway, close in age to Archaeopteryx. And that's not even all of them. Inevitably there are gaps, because there always will be gaps even if you find millions of fossils (very tiny gaps), but it's fair to say that the distinction between birds and certain dinosaurs has progressively become so blurry and arbitrary that it's hard to reliably draw the line between them. Wishbones? We used to think they were unique to birds. No. Even T. rex has a wishbone. And the list goes on and on of features we thought were unique to birds but turn out not to be. People are even questioning whether the conventional view that Archaeopteryx is a bird is correct, rather than a side-branch close to the divergence between birds and dinosaurs, which if accepted would mean you could have a flying dinosaur that isn't technically regarded as a "bird". That would be weird.

Even after all those discoveries of the last 20 years or so, anti-evolutionary creationists still assure us that there are immutable boundaries between categories of life. Scientists still do argue about the exact relationships between these various group, but it is always going to be hard to resolve close to the branch points. I think any reasonable person looking at the history of discoveries would say that we aren't seeing ever-clearer indications that birds and dinosaurs are completely distinct, but that over time they blur together more and more. This is not unique to birds either. The same sort of thing is seen if you compare, say, what was known about the transition between fish and land vertebrates in the 1800s versus the fossils that are known now. Nobody expects a perfect record of life on Earth, but the pattern with increased sampling of it is pretty obvious. To me it is no more of a jump than when you draw a regression line through an ever-increasing number of sample points along a clear trend. Meanwhile the anti-evolutionary creationists will forever emphasize that there are spaces between the data points.

Re:So Many Missing Links to Choose From

[m.ducharme]

The Creationist, of course. Goodbye.

Re:So Many Missing Links to Choose From

[Black Parrot]

And Evolution is still a theory because fossil can only prove a species existed not that it turned into another. That can't be proven empirically.

Uh... *nothing* can be proven empirically. Proofs use axioms and rules of logical inference. Theories use a more generic sort of inference from evidence.

And evolution is "still a theory" because theories are as good as it gets in the empirical sciences, and no evidence has come along to shoot that theory down.

Evolution, general relativity, and the atomic theory are "still theories"; phlogiston and the steady-state universe are not. "Theory" is the corner where we park the winners, not the losers.

Re:So Many Missing Links to Choose From

[RPI Geek]

>> And Evolution is still a theory because fossil can only prove a species existed not that it turned into another. That can't be proven empirically.

Gravity is still a theory, too.

Speciation has been observed, but I'll concede the point that it hasn't been observed in dinosaurs.

Re:So Many Missing Links to Choose From

[mean pun]

No. fact is where we park winner. You drop something from a 110 story building, it falls at the same rate either feather or brick. that's gravity. Gravity is fact.

Why are you so sure that that will be the observed behavior? Gravity is just a theory. Granted, there are a lot of observations that fit the theory, but how can you be absolutely sure that this theory applies at every place and moment? You are basing yourself on a finite number of observations, and the vast majority of these observations are so casual that they wouldn't spot subtle deviations.

Actually, I am sure that if you drop a feather and a brick and a feather from a 110 story building they will not fall at the same rate, and neither of them will fall at a rate or trajectory predicted by gravity.

Dinosaur Feathers Found In Amber?

[Obfuscant]

I assume Amber was refusing to walk through the TSA body-scanner and had thus been subjected to the full-body search? And people say there is no value to such searches. Look at the advances in science we are getting. Thanks, TSA!

Re:Birds are dinosaurs

[UnresolvedExternal]

Dear god, please don't quote Jurassic Park as a reference.....

You know what would be cool?

[bigsexyjoe]

If the dinosaurs also talked like some birds. And when they where about to eat you they menaced you by repeating the words of the last person they ate. So they'd corner you and yell, "Please don't eat me! Please don't eat me! Oh God! Nooo!"
Kind of an out there thought but I had to share. I thought it was cool.

Re:You know what would be cool?

[swanzilla]

This is a unix system, I know this! This is a unix system, I know this! Oh god! Nooo!

Re:You know what would be cool?

[airfoobar]

Clever girl...

Re:You know what would be cool?

[Intropy]

fsn was made for IRIX systems so I guess it's not too terribly surprising that's what a bunch of CGI guys would pick when told to "Show something computery... and make it look good."

Re:You know what would be cool?

[tehcyder]

Awesome, it's similar to Predator when the alien copies bits he hears people saying and repeats them back.

"Any time..."

Re:Birds are dinosaurs

[airfoobar]

Good thing for ILM too, because in 1992 rendering feathered dinosaurs would have taken ages! ;)

Re:Spielberg does a Lucas

[SETIGuy]

Science and Michael Crichton always had a hate-hate relationship.

That Dang Amber- I keep telling her

[gearloos]

That Dang Amber- I keep telling her I'm gonna break up with her if she doesn't stop that kinky stuff!

Re:Birds are dinosaurs

[Monkey-Man2000]

You are incorrect. Jurassic Park is what popularized to the public the idea that birds descended from dinosaurs for the regular person. I remember this distinctly in the documentaries about making the movie. This was an explicit intention of Spielberg. The book may not reflect this explicitly, but the movie and CG certainly did. Spielberg's dinosaur scientific consultant's were some of the principal proponents of the 'birds descended from dinosaurs'-theory and they've gone on to be vindicated as well as he has since the movie and book came out. I don't have the references off-hand, but it's certainly true. If you're just hung-up about the feathers part, you may be correct about that part at the time because feathers are so hard to preserve for obvious reasons... But frankly, who the fuck cares about feathers on dinosaurs? Now, whenever I walk into a park I'm concerned these vicious pigeons could attack me like a velociraptor (it's in their blood)!!!

DAMN YOU SPIELBERG!!!

Re:Spielberg does a Lucas

[izomiac]

Timeline:

• 1990 - Jurassic Park book released
• 1993 - Jurassic Park movie released
• 1998 - Feathers discovered on a velociraptor

Now, although I enjoy Crichton's works, most are soft science fiction (harder than most though). The velociraptors were far more like Deinonychus antirrhopus (considered a species of Velociraptor by Crichton's primary source, though the dispute is even acknowledged by Alan Grant, oh, and no feathers have been found on this species), and a lot of cinematic liberty was taken in the movie and book. Most of it's not terribly important to the central theme, which is fairly common for his works. It's also rather common for people to not realize there is a theme to his books.

BTW, have some basic respect for the dead, even if you disagree with him or don't care for his works. Save your jokes for people who are alive or committed serious crimes in life.

Re:Spielberg does a Lucas

[dbIII]

Even going back to the "doctors with nukes" thriller of Andromeda Strain the science, technology and engineering has been a very twistable plot device. Even today we don't really have the gear that was supposed to be available in the present of "Congo" (1980) because satellite communications gear still takes time to set up for more than a tiny bandwidth, let alone under a thick dripping wet multi-layered tree canopy. In his later works he even used his influence in an attempt to discredit established science. A lot of the stories are fun (homicidal albino gorillas with stone ping pong bats?) but remember that he also did a lot of poking fun at science from what he saw as his superior position as a medical doctor. To me those smug blatant attacks made his later books unreadable and I doubt they would have been published in that form if he didn't already have a reputation. He needed an editor to get him away from the tirade and into the action.
Jurassic Park had a lot of admitted dumbing down and bait and switch to get the story moving and the movie to fit, which is fair enough because nobody pretended otherwise, but it's where Crichton used his influence to deliberately sell misinformation as information that annoyed me when he was alive. Just accept him as a fiction writer that made some things in science popular. He brought comments like the above "hate-hate" relationship on himself when he was alive and they are not going to go away for a while, it's got nothing to do with "respect for the dead".

Re:Spielberg does a Lucas

[Lord_of_the_nerf]

My basic respect extends as far as I think he deserves.

When I write a misleading author's note about global warming on my next book, I'll expect no less.