Researchers Discover Largest Ever Dinosaur With Birdlike Wings and Feathers 47
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.
WIngs are for? (Score:2, Interesting)
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I always wondered about Buffalo wings...
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I always wondered about Buffalo wings...
My I still try to find the online comic that jokes about Buffalo fingers. Tim S.
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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.....
Other than leaping further, limbs would be just as useful if not more so than wings. Wings could also help you stop faster, if that was of any benefit.
I don't understand... (Score:1)
Need Jurassic World Reboot (Score:3)
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Future anthropologists probably won't realize we're feathered either.
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Re:Need Jurassic World Reboot (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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).
Yeah, what they had in the movie looked like Deinonychus. But Velociraptor sounds like something more 12 year old boys would pay to see.
Bum rap (Score:1, Funny)
It would suck to be a dino: your front arms are too short to yank off.
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You're assuming their cock is as short as yours.
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Feather origin still unclear (Score:5, Informative)
(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).
Birds are not living dinosaurs, (Score:3)
they are birds. It's called speciation.
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My first thought on that was that surely crocodiles, alligators, and turtles are also modern descendants of the dinosaur lineage. I don't think they evolved from small mammals.
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Well, sure, if you redefine the word 'dinosaur'.
Oh look. That's what they did. [wikipedia.org]
I'll stick with the old definition of dinosaur: reptiles that lived millions of years ago.
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"Reptile"is another word that no longer has a solid scientific definition. (In large part because of birds.)
The classic definition of reptile (since you're so enamored of classic, outmoded definitions of terms) includes being cold-blooded, though, so Dinosaurs wouldn't qualify anyway.
But if you really enjoy speaking your own variant of English that is out of sync with what most people speak, more power to you. Just don't expect people to understand your antiquated and bizarrely anti-scientific terminology.
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Actually, the Wikipedia article I linked to explicitly says that my definition is what most people consider to be correct. It's only a new generation of 'dinosaur experts' that have decided they don't like that definition, and have came up with a new classification system. Now, only one particular group of ancient reptiles counts as dinosaurs, based solely on their hip joint, even though many of that group don't fit at all the classic view of dinosaurs.
As a point of fact, the term 'dinosaur' is itself mis-d
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My first thought on that was that surely crocodiles, alligators, and turtles are also modern descendants of the dinosaur lineage. I don't think they evolved from small mammals.
No... Just like mammals are not descendants of dinosaurs. Not all prehistoric animals were dinosaurs, only the birds were. The reptile and mammal ancestors were contemporary with dinosaurs but were different groups. Think of them as respectively furry, scaly and feathered prehistoric -saurs, with the feathered being the dinos.
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"Reptile" is a taxonomic bucket list. Best avoided.
Mammals are more closely related to the archosaurs than the lizards.
Re:Birds are not living dinosaurs, (Score:4, Interesting)
"Dinosaur" is not a species. Nor is "bird."
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Picky picky.
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Re:Birds are not living dinosaurs, (Score:4, Insightful)
XKCD disagrees with you. [xkcd.com]
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Argumentum ad xkcd
Proof by intimidation.
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XKCD is wrong.
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Is the current scientific consensus also "wrong"?
Scientific consensus is that birds are modern theropod dinosaurs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Under phylogenetic taxonomy, dinosaurs are usually defined as the group consisting of Triceratops, Neornithes [modern birds], their most recent common ancestor (MRCA), and all descendants
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Incomplete headline (Score:3)
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.
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"Largest Birdlike Dinosaur Ever" seems a more apt description.
I'd argue that's more misleading. Although the technical definition of "dinosaur" excludes pterosaurs [wikipedia.org], it's worth nothing that there were some rather large ones, notably Quetzalcoatlus [wikipedia.org] 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.
Too fanciful. (Score:2)