New Feathered Dinosaur or Bird?
Paleontologists have discovered what they call a dinosaur tail encased in amber with juvenile feathers. And it is helping scientists to make up stories about how feathers evolved. "A lot of what we know about the evolution of feathers we've pieced together from two-dimensional data," Alan Turner, a paleontologist at Stony Brook University, tells The Christian Science Monitor. Most ancient feathers are preserved in compression fossils, formed in shale where preserved material is flattened in the sediment. But living organisms are not flat. So "having something three-dimensional like this is nice because the three-dimensional geometry is preserved." The amber specimen is described in a technical paper published December 8, 2016 in the journal Current Biology. The fossil was from a young, sparrow-sized animal which, “…likely brushed up against a tree sticky with resin some 99 million years ago in the (Middle Cretaceous). The middle section of th...