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First Dinosaur Tail Found Preserved in Amber (nationalgeographic.com)
The tail of a beautiful, feathered dinosaur has been found perfectly preserved in amber from Myanmar. It is a huge breakthrough that could help open a new window on the biology of a group that dominated Earth for more than 160 million years. From a report on the National Geographic: The semitranslucent mid-Cretaceous amber sample, roughly the size and shape of a dried apricot, captures one of the earliest moments of differentiation between the feathers of birds of flight and the feathers of dinosaurs. Inside the lump of resin is a 1.4-inch appendage covered in delicate feathers, described as chestnut brown with a pale or white underside. CT scans and microscopic analysis of the sample revealed eight vertebrae from the middle or end of a long, thin tail that may have been originally made up of more than 25 vertebrae. NPR has a story on how this amber was found. An excerpt from it reads: In 2015, Lida Xing was visiting a market in northern Myanmar when a salesman brought out a piece of amber about the size of a pink rubber eraser. Inside, he could see a couple of ancient ants and a fuzzy brown tuft that the salesman said was a plant. As soon as Xing saw it, he knew it wasn't a plant. It was the delicate, feathered tail of a tiny dinosaur.
Just a dead parrot.
I know amber is fossilized tree resin, but at this point is it possible to somehow dissolve the amber without destroying what's inside it?
It would be interesting if it could be done so we could see the tail and feathers in real light without the amber being in between.
Also, from the picture, there are bits and pieces of vegetation not to mention at least one ant inside the specimen which could be recovered.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Here is another one with tail feathers from a bird, ~100million years BC.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
When does the damn park open?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Why do you think there's only a bit of tail left?
It's like eating ramen, sometimes a little bit of noodle doesn't get slurped down and falls out! It's not likely dinosaur had good noodle slurping lips.
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Either way, what a huge find, this is awesome! Colors, positioning, type of feathers. The feathers on this tail are more floppy like the display, not flight, feathers in modern birds, showing that sexual display likely came before flight in evolution. Colors probably were important early on some are saying.
Bird-like dinosaurs just got a whole lot more real.
Why do you think there's only a bit of tail left?
It's like eating ramen, sometimes a little bit of noodle doesn't get slurped down and falls out! It's not likely dinosaur had good noodle slurping lips.
Great, now I got an image of a T-Rex trying to use chopsticks stuck in my head... great...
still, not as bad as a T-Rex trying to play chopsticks... dammit!
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
We are predisposed to think of feathers as equipment for flying. But seeing all those flying "dinosaurs" flitting about our yard is misleading.
Reptilian scales are basically fish scales that have been greatly toughened to control moisture loss, allowing colonization of the land. But if you are a non-big dinosaur, thermal regulation is a significant problem. Feathers are basically scales that can be fluffed up or laid flat, to varying degrees, giving different insulating profiles, at the cost of possibly losing some moisture, which many dinosaurs could well afford.
The feather more appropriate for flying could have been variants that were big for display and could lay very flat. But the original purpose was not flying. Flatness is possibly desirable for: reducing insulation when desired, streamlining the body if traveling quickly through brush, making big visual displays with relatively light equipment. However a small dinosaur that jumped around trees would find that large flattish feathers would give it added control over gliding descents, which is a fabulous thing if you are in a hurry.
To be fair, when Chrighton wrote the original book 24-odd years ago, it was NOT 'science fiction' - it was definitely viable science based on the knowledge of the day. Amber was known to preserve soft-tissue, mosquitos and other blood-sucking insects from the dinosaur era had been found in amber and DNA had been recovered from amber.
It seemed entirely within the realm of what would be possible in the next few years.
In the intervening period a few things happened:
1) It was found that the DNA from the original species in the amber decayed
2) The human genome project was completed -and came with a massively shocking discovery: human DNA was far simpler than that of animals we'd genotyped years earlier like frogs (indeed - an order of magnitude fewer genes), which when we had to explain how that's possible turned our entire view of how DNA works upside down. The current view is that DNA is not a blueprint for a species, but a set of instructions for building a member of one - which makes assumptions. The more advanced the species is, the more assumptions can be made and the fewer conditionals have to be specified in the code. It's like stripping off the 'if arch == x86' part of your code because nobody uses a 32-bit computer anymore. Frogs have DNA to repond to various temperature ranges, humity levels etc. etc. basically to adjust the growth of the fetus to the ever-changing conditions in the pond all the time. Humans have a womb with very fixed conditions - so none of those are needed.
3) With this realization - we actually genotyped the DNA recovered from amber - and it turned out to be from (much later) external contamination (mostly bacterial DNA).
Those things shifted the Jurassic park scenario firmly into the science fiction region - but one should be fair to a brilliant writer with some pretty solid scientific credentials (in the field of medicine), when it was written it was in the realm of highly conceivable science fiction.
He also updated his writing to reflect changes in the field. His last book "Timeline" also deals with genetics - and is set firmly in the areas of genetics where active research is happening right now, and dealing with the (very significant) social and legal questions that is raised by such ridiculous concepts as allowing companies to patent genes.
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