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

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

[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.

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!

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: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.

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:Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Won't it just taste like chicken?

Technically chicken tastes like dinosaur.