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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.
Even for a flightless creature, wings could certainly help it run faster and steadier, turn quicker, and/or leap further. I've got no clue, just sayin.....
I don't understand how scientists could use birdlike wings and feathers to find large dinosaurs.
PlanetVulkan.com
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).
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
It would suck to be a dino: your front arms are too short to yank off.
Table-ized A.I.
(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).
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they are birds. It's called speciation.
Researchers Discover Largest Ever Dinosaur With Birdlike Wings and Feathers
...that we know of so far. There could have been a larger one we haven't discovered yet.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
They depict a large fearsome creature in blue. Not at all like a friendly yellow bird. So it is not Big Bird.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"Largest Birdlike Dinosaur Ever" seems a more apt description.
I'd argue that's more misleading. Although the technical definition of "dinosaur" excludes pterosaurs, it's worth nothing that there were some rather large ones, notably Quetzalcoatlus which had a ~35 ft. wingspan, but wasn't feathered - it had wings of a thin fleshy membrane, like a bat.
So "dinosaur with birdlike wings and feathers" is an important distinction.
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