Siberian Discovery Suggests Almost All Dinosaurs Were Feathered 139
A new study published in Science (abstract) suggests that most dinosaurs were covered with feathers. This conclusion was drawn after the discovery of fossils belonging to a 1.5-meter-long, two-legged dinosaur called Kulindadromeus zabaikalicus. "The fossils, which included six skulls and many more bones, greatly broaden the number of families of dinosaurs sporting feathers—downy, ribboned, and thin ones in this case—indicating that plumes evolved from the scales that covered earlier reptiles, probably as insulation." Its distinctiveness from earlier theropod fossil discoveries suggests that feathered dinosaurs appeared much further back in history than previously thought. Paleontologist Stephen Brusatte said, "This does mean that we can now be very confident that feathers weren't just an invention of birds and their closest relatives, but evolved much deeper in dinosaur history. I think that the common ancestor of dinosaurs probably had feathers, and that all dinosaurs had some type of feather, just like all mammals have some type of hair."
Whelp. (Score:5, Funny)
Time to remake Jurassic Park. And while he's at it, Speilberg can change all the guns to flashlights!
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Time to remake Jurassic Park. And while he's at it, Speilberg can change all the guns to flashlights!
Nah, with all the T-Rexes looking like chickens it just won't be the same... although... just imagine the Kentucky fired drumsticks.
Re:Whelp. (Score:4, Funny)
You think a T-Rex "chicken" wouldn't be scary? Imagine a 15 foot tall, 40 foot long bird of prey with a 4 foot jaw and 9 inch long teeth. Your average adult human would be finger food - a bite or two and then gone. This gets even more terrifying if you imagine them as giant cockatoos (and if you know how nasty cockatoos can be).
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Plenty big!
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Moas weren't carnivores
The Maoris ate them, not the other way round.
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I knew the bird in Up was real.
Something like this? (Score:2)
Giant Chickensaurus Rex from Elmo in Grouchland?
http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net... [nocookie.net]
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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You think a T-Rex "chicken" wouldn't be scary?
And imagine what a Jurassic geek (*) would look like.
(*) geek: a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken.
Re:Whelp. (Score:5, Interesting)
You think a T-Rex "chicken" wouldn't be scary? Imagine a 15 foot tall, 40 foot long bird of prey with a 4 foot jaw and 9 inch long teeth. Your average adult human would be finger food - a bite or two and then gone. This gets even more terrifying if you imagine them as giant cockatoos (and if you know how nasty cockatoos can be).
I worked a good many years in an exotic pet store. My area of expertise was reptiles and, in my time, i was bitten by all manner of things that most people don't want to get bitten by. Of all the animals i would deal with, the birds were the things that really terrified me.
Reptiles, yeah, you gotta repect them, esspecially the highly venemous ones. But, they are predictable and easily outsmarted. Birds can be fierce opponents. They are intelligence combined with effective weapons. They can deduce it's better to ignore the leather glove and aim for the exposed forearm. There was one macaw that i swear would pretend to be nice just to lull me into a vulnerable position.
Not a day goes by that i'm not thankful that i live in a world where i only have to worry about sharks, big cats, bears, wolves, and reptiles. I would be terrified having to worry about a bird that might get me.
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My in-laws have a cockatoo thus my choice of that bird. (They used to have two but one died about 10 years ago.) These birds' jaws are powerful enough to crush bone and intelligent enough to plan out actions. Like you said, a reptile might strike you but you'd see it coming. My in-laws' cockatoo does what that macaw you mentioned did. She will act all sweet and want you to pet her... until she decides to bite your finger off. She hasn't succeeded yet, but that's because we're extra cautious about body
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I have an African Grey, I've seen him humble a pit bull.
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I have an African Grey, I've seen him humble a pit bull.
Was it with his withering sarcasm?
(African Greys are quite chatty and very intelligent, for those unfamiliar with the breed).
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They have intelligence and nasty beaks/claws. If their wings aren't clipped, they can also fly and attack from all angles. That's a very bad combination for anyone an African Grey (or Macaw, Cockatoo, etc) decides to attack.
Re:Whelp. (Score:4, Funny)
Kind of. He went up to the dog and recited a perfect cat meow. That confused the hell out of the dog. Then, while the dog was befuddled, he let out his patented SCRECH and the pit bull ran under the bed.
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This sounds familiar. One summer when staying at my grandmother's house, my brother taught her African Grey to meow, solely to annoy her. I'd walk by the room and I'd hear a meeeeeeeeeeeeeoww. It sounded like a doppler effect, like the cat was in a car going by at 50 mph.
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Your average adult human would be finger food - a bite or two and then gone..
I'm fairly sure that "Human McNuggets" is the Palaeontological term for this.
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You wanna watch how you talk about my wife.
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Sheldon would be so terrified...
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Time to remake Jurassic Park. And while he's at it, Speilberg can change all the guns to flashlights!
Nah, with all the T-Rexes looking like chickens it just won't be the same... although... just imagine the Kentucky fired drumsticks.
Re:Whelp. (Score:4, Funny)
Nope.
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Dr. Grant: "...just remember, you are alive when they start to eat you, so try to show a little respect, okay?"
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I wonder how much resistance a theory like this gets just because feathered dinosaurs wouldn't look nearly as cool as the ones we see pictured today? The emotional part of my brain finds itself not wanting to spoil my childhood images of what dinosaurs looked like by pasting silly-looking feathers all over them, even while the intellectual part is berating it for being silly. I suppose it's the same sort of phenomenon as the outcry over Pluto being "demoted" from planet status. Humans are funny.
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I wonder how much resistance a theory like this gets just because feathered dinosaurs wouldn't look nearly as cool as the ones we see pictured today?
For me, the resistance comes when I look at the large reptiles of today which are descended from dinosaurs.They don't have feathers.
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For me, the resistance comes when I look at the large reptiles of today which are descended from dinosaurs.They don't have feathers.
Which large reptiles are those? And which dinosaurs are they descended from? And how did dinosaurs, which were all killed at the KT boundary, manage to have descendents?
Dinosaurs are reptiles with their legs under their bodies. This makes them distinct from other reptiles (the kinds we have today, which are not descended from dinosaurs) which have their legs off to the side.
Mammals also managed the legs-under-the-body trick, and birds (which are descended from dinosaurs, unlike all modern reptiles, none of
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large reptiles of today which are descended from dinosaurs.
Uh, nope. Crocodilians for certain predate dinosaurs and evolved in parallel. I'm pretty sure the other big lizards did too.
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I wonder how much resistance a theory like this gets just because feathered dinosaurs wouldn't look nearly as cool as the ones we see pictured today? The emotional part of my brain finds itself not wanting to spoil my childhood images of what dinosaurs looked like by pasting silly-looking feathers all over them, even while the intellectual part is berating it for being silly. I suppose it's the same sort of phenomenon as the outcry over Pluto being "demoted" from planet status. Humans are funny.
If anything they'd look cooler with feathers. It also explains a whole lot, like how they were able to survive in the Arctic.
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What happened to Slashdot lately?
There's a xkcd for that: http://xkcd.com/1104/ [xkcd.com]
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Imagine the size of the Beer Can to barbecue it!!
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Time to remake Jurassic Park. And while he's at it, Speilberg can change all the guns to flashlights!
That doesnt sound very scary. Sounds more like... a six foot turkey!
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Re: Whelp. (Score:1)
Time to remake the creation story as well.
Dang... (Score:2)
This means we'll have to redraw 200 years worth of artwork...
Re:Dang... (Score:5, Funny)
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That is interesting. Could you provide more details about this test you performed, and precisely the results?
If the test can be recreated, and the results demonstrated to logically support the conclusion, then you will have just revolutionized the foundations of the modern scientific world view. You stand to become quite wealthy and famous, and to win a Nobel prize.
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Assuming you are Christian (Score:2)
I timothy 2:3-4: "This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth."
(see also 2 Peter 3:9)
So...God wants us to be saved, but you don't? You have in your hands an irrefutable test that will bring us all to knowledge of the truth (and hence salvation) and yet you are refusing to give it to us? Don't you want to please God by furthering his desires (that we all might be saved)? Are you not humble enough to think tha
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About me? Matthew 25:34 - 36: "Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’"
This is what Jesus said about hu
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Please, don't confuse him with these... These... Words?
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My money is on Zeus. If Zeus and Flying Spagetthi Monster had a fight and I know who would end up being the lunch.
Never piss off Zeus. He might turn into a bull and shag you to the next Tuesday.
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For the TL;DR crowd - Go read some Paul Tillich
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You evidently don't understand what science is. Science is "right", because the point is that falsehoods are verifiable, and the established truths are verified by the process of peer review. Science is also getting more "right" with each new discovery. This discovery doesn't invalidate previous discoveries: it bolsters them, and adds new information.
We used to think the Earth was the center of the Universe. New discoveries led to new insights. These changes to the scientific understanding didn't change the model of the motion of planets across the sky. It helped improve them.
Conversely, I don't see anyone blaming creationist parks.
There are also museums of natural history dotted around the world, which collectively contain (I would say) tens of thousands of models, which would either have to be replaced or reworked, or reinterpreted as being an artefact of an earlier, less complete understanding.
Say what? There is very little in science that is right. Take the atom, if we accept what we know today about it, then pretty much everything for the last century or two is wrong. Same with dinosaurs. If they were all covered in feathers, then what we knew about them before is wrong.
If scientific ideas really were right, then there wouldn't be changes in understanding. Such a concept wouldn't make sense. Math is right or wrong. 2+2 = 4 is either right or it is not. Our understanding of higher mathemati
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There are more models to support the scientific theory, but even then, there are something like 35 competing theories of evolution.
Possibly, but the general concept isn't even remotely controversial (at least among actual scientists). Especially the theory that humans and apes have a common ancestor, which is simultaneously the most minimal example of evolution, and the one that seems to upset people the most.
However, if one wants to be totally objective (or at least minimize biases), one has to admit that
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"The Bible, however, is immutable, and the literalists have to resort to increasingly contorted explanations for how the Genesis account could be factually correct."
Good parroting of the popular Dawkins-driven line, but simply vastly historically incorrect as the sequence of events. Origen of Alexandria (one of the "Fathers of the Church", that is, one shaping core positions at the very earliest foundation of Christianity) was arguing for allegorical interpretation of Genesis in the second century A.D.
The
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Good parroting of the popular Dawkins-driven line, but simply vastly historically incorrect as the sequence of events. Origen of Alexandria (one of the "Fathers of the Church", that is, one shaping core positions at the very earliest foundation of Christianity) was arguing for allegorical interpretation of Genesis in the second century A.D.
I'm aware that many Christians throughout history have argued for an allegorical interpretation of Genesis, which is why I specifically said "literalists" (i.e. creationi
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Science is wrong
That's a bit of an exaggeration. Science was incomplete, in the sense that our assumptions about the appearance of dinosaurs were based on limited fossil evidence (and analogies to modern lizards rather than birds). And the raw evidence wasn't even "wrong", it was totally valid - only our interpretations were incorrect. Now we have new evidence, which is being incorporated into how we think about dinosaurs. When was the last time that anything was added to the Bible?
Re:Dang... (Score:4, Informative)
Interesting. Science is wrong, and "creationist parks" get the blame.
Hmmm ... This isn't really a case of scientists being wrong. The old images of dinosaurs have generally been "artists' interpretations" of the evidence, and scientists generally agreed that they had little evidence of the outer appearance of dinosaurs. Skin and other soft tissues don't fossilize too well, and we haven't had many samples until recently.
And the idea that birds are close relatives of or descended from dinosaurs isn't new. It was suggested by none other than Charles Darwin himself, based on similarities in the skeletons. Many of his colleagues agreed, but they even more agreed with the reply "Yeah, that's certainly interesting; can you find us some better evidence?" The situation stayed that way until the 1970s or so, because birds don't fossilize well. New fossil discoveries finally supplied enough evidence so that in the 1980s, the birds got officially reclassified as a branch of the dinosaurs.
But it was still well understood that there were a lot of loose ends, and Further Research Is Needed. Were feathers a development of the birds, for flight? Or had their non-flying ancestors had feathers, perhaps for insulation? The evidence wasn't nearly good enough, and it was left as an open question. Over the past decade or so, the evidence has trickled in, and this report seems to be filling in the gap. People who've followed the story aren't surprised; they're just happy to read about the evidence.
In any case, it never was a case of "Scientists thought that dinosaurs didn't have any sort of fur or feathers, but they've been proven wrong". It was more like "We didn't have the evidence, since feathers don't fossilize well, and now we've collected enough evidence that we can be pretty sure that those old artistic interpretations reptilian dinosaurs with bare skin were inaccurate; most of them (except the largest) probably did have feathers." This isn't considered a criticism of the artists, of course, since they didn't have evidence either, and many of them stated repeatedly that most of their drawings included a large shovel-full of conjecture. It was expected that, as evidence trickled in, they'd have to revise their drawings a lot.
But it likely is a good example of non-scientists saying "Scientists proved wrong" when the scientific data goes from "we don't really know ..." to "we've found the evidence ...". This is sorta the flip side of the constant "Those scientists just wasted time and money doing research to prove something that we knew all along" comments from people who have little understanding of what science is all about (and have always "known" things based on no evidence at all).
(Actually, since I first read about this topic back in the 1970s, I've been rooting for the tyrannosaurs having big, colorful cockatoo-like crowns of feathers. But that's just me, and I'm still waiting. But I won't be surprised either way. ;-)
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Science is not wrong. We get new knowledge and gain from it, refining our ideas about the past, instead of getting stuck with our heads deep in our asses and insisting the world was created 4004BC, on a particular October day, 23th to be exact.
Re:Dang... (Score:5, Funny)
This means we'll have to redraw 200 years worth of artwork...
And redo other things.... The phrase "Kulindadromeus zabaikalicus of a feather flock together." doesn't really roll off the tongue.
Wish bone (Score:1)
I remember hearing once that if the first dinosaurs discovered had wishbones we would have never said they went extinct. We would have said they were a past generation of birds that died off.
Rather broad leap.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Find some more feathered fossils and conclude that ALL dinosaurs probably had feathers.
I propose that a heck of a lot more digging and research is necessary before anyone starts putting that in print.
Rather broad leap.. (Score:2, Informative)
For those of us who have been following the literature on the subject, this doesn't really come as a surprise. Rather than that this fossil shows that all/most dinosaurs had feathers where we previously assumed this to be the case only for some groups, this fossil is a confirmation of the already commonly held view (in the field) that feathers were to all probability basal in dinosaurs.
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Find some more feathered fossils and conclude that ALL dinosaurs probably had feathers.
It makes a little more sense to conclude something like that when the fossils are very old and of a different lineage than other feathered dinosaurs. The Guardian article does a much better job at explaining the reasoning than the NatGeo article.
Re:Rather broad leap.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Wow, amazing... (Score:1)
Re:Wow, amazing... (Score:4, Interesting)
Australia's Demon Duck of Doom [wikipedia.org]
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And that multi-color sun screen stuff on their noses.
Re:Wow, amazing... (Score:4, Insightful)
You realize Siberia wasn't above the arctic circle 160million years ago right? Also... the whole planet was a lot hotter.
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From the article... (Score:3, Funny)
Of course these dinosaurs couldn't fly; everyone knows that in the late Triassic, the Pterosaurs [wikipedia.org] received a broad-reaching patent titled "Feathery Apparatus for Flight". Regrettably, the patent term length at the time was over one hundred million years.
first thought (Score:3)
The next Jurassic Park could be a lot more interesting.
But probably won't be.
I had a Chuckle (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like the dinosaurs were humiliated backwards... feathered ...then tarred.
Re:I had a Chuckle (Score:5, Funny)
At least they weren't gzipped.
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At least they weren't gzipped.
Don't be ridiculous. The dinosaurs lived long before the GNU utils were written. They would have been compressed [die.net].
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Big Dinos Probably all had Scales (Score:1)
What's their definition of "most dinosaurs"? Maybe most as in, there was this one tiny feathered dinosaur that bred like rabbits and was everywhere? And do they mean "had feathers" as in had 3 tiny feathers on the top of a big lizardy dino head? Big dinos almost always had scales from what I've read. And perhaps size is part of is as is seen in recent animals and animals today... larger mammals have far far less fur except during the times of ice ages.
I found a couple of links that show scales, no feathers,
Scales to feathers (Score:2)
I've never understood this idea. Sure at a macroscopic scale there is some resemblance between scales and feathers, but on looking close you get an entirely different structure.
Scales being basically flat plates and feathers being long rods with interconnected hooks on them.
If this story is correct and way more dinosaurs had feathers than previously thought, then why force it?
"Almost all" (Score:2)
Not quite. Sauropods are dinosaurs too and none have been found with feathers that I'm aware of.
Swoop will be happy (Score:2)
But my guess is the other Dinobots won't like it.
"Me Grimlock no like being bird"
Those crazy scientists! (Score:2)
And by god if Brontosaurus was good enough for Fred Flintstone, it's good enough for me!
great (Score:1)
dinosaur history (Score:1)
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