Researchers Discover Largest Ever Dinosaur With Birdlike Wings and Feathers

sciencehabit writes: When we see birds winging their way across the sky, we are really looking at living dinosaurs—the only lineage of these mighty beasts that survived mass extinction. Yet before they went extinct, many dinosaurs sprouted wings themselves. Researchers now report finding the largest ever winged dino in China, a sleek, birdlike creature adorned with multiple layers of feathers all over its arms and torso that lived 125 million years ago. The dino was about 1.65 meters long, a little longer than a modern condor, but at an estimated 20 kilograms, it was probably nearly twice as heavy as that bird. It almost certainly could not fly, however—an important confirmation that wings and feathers originally evolved to serve other functions like attracting mates and keeping eggs warm.

Comments

Feather origin still unclear

[Webs 101]

(I was a grad student of John Ostrom's once upon a time.)

This may be "the first evidence of feather morphologies and distribution in a short-armed (and probably non-volant) dromaeosaurid" but this dinosaur says nothing about the origins of flight feathers. It lived 25 million years AFTER Archaeopteryx, so there were certainly flight feathers around for a very long time before it. This is really no more surprising than the fact that ostriches and emus still have feathers.

The real question, which remains unanswered, is the exact relationship between dromaeosurids and birds and whether flight originated from the ground up (use of drag to control running) or the top down (use of drag to create lift).

Re:Need Jurassic World Reboot

[tompaulco]

Read another piece yesterday that mentioned the find in question here was of a very, very close cousin to the good ol' Velociraptor. The conclusion there was that the Velociraptor was likely feathered as well, and not likely to look much like the leather/scaley beasts from the movies (and, um, they weren't that big, either, apparently).

The movie mentioned that same thing about feathers and said that the public wanted big scary monsters with no feathers.