We now have definitive proof dinosaurs had feathers. A piece of amber was preserved and it is IMMACULATE. This is a once in a thousand year kind of find. Age data has also been definitively proven as mid-Cretaceous ~99 million years ago.
It was a super cute little therapod that could stand in your hand.
I think it’s about time a disclaimer was posted on Ken Hamm’s Ark exhibibit stating it is fantasy. Or they at least remove the word “museum”. Cause as bad as it was before they had a kid riding a dinosaur in an exhibit, it’s now anatomically incorrect as well since they don’t have feathers lol.
Getting back to the science, this is a real cutie of a dinosaur.
Beat me to the punch. It’s still kind of amazing to think that when I was a kid we had no idea about this. A real lesson in having a humble epistemology.
On the flip side, it’s pretty amazing that we had any idea at all what animals that lived a hundred million years ago looked like at all based on fossilized bone fragments.
Photomicrographs of DIP-V-15103 Plumage (A) Pale ventral feather in transmitted light (arrow indicates rachis apex). (B) Dark-field image of (A), highlighting structure and visible color. (C) Dark dorsal feather in transmitted light, apex toward bottom of image. (D) Base of ventral feather (arrow) with weakly developed rachis. (E) Pigment distribution and microstructure of barbules in (C), with white lines pointing to pigmented regions of barbules. (F–H) Barbule structure variation and pigmentation, among barbs, and ‘rachis’ with rachidial barbules (near arrows); images from apical, mid-feather, and basal positions respectively. Scale bars, 1 mm in (A), 0.5 mm in (B)–(E), and 0.25 mm in (F)–(H). See also Figure S4.
It’s further proof that sinful science doesn’t know anything for certain and Satan’s “facts” change with supposedly new discoveries, also how can we take the word of these liar scientists when they claim something is millions of years old? The Bible clearly shows God created the Earth 6,000 years ago.
Something I’ve wondered about. While I can understand the development of feathers as a mating primer or temperature regulator - it seems like any benefit would have been more than offset by the parasite problem. Thick alligator skin is not nearly as vulnerable to mosquitoes, lice, and ticks as a feathered creature. I wish we had a time machine, more-so than paleontology provides, to see what was going on influencing their evolution. Maybe temperature fluctuated way more than we thought so the positive of feathers was more beneficial than the negatives that go along with them.
Ive just realised how little I know about feathers. Do we know if Dinos evolved from birds, or if all of today’s birds evolved from dinosaurs? Are feathers necessary for flight? Or are they just handy skin coverings as they are very light?
In a very real sense, birds are dinosaurs. And their closest relatives among the other dinosaurs include the thing whose tail got left in the amber (and Velociraptor, too).
There are tons of things that evolved for one use and later turned out to be useful for other things. Like our spine. That sure as heck did not evolve specifically to hold us up as we walk on two legs (it is barely adequate at that job - just anyone with a bad back). The vertebral column didn’t even evolve to hold 4-legged critters up off the ground while they walk and run, though it is actually pretty darn good for that. It did evolve as a flexible but solid anchoring place for muscles that were really useful in swimming using a side-to-side fish-like motion.
I don’t think everyone in the paleo world is totally convinced that feathers did not evolve directly for flight, but that idea is looking less and less and less likely.
Allow me to deconstruct it so that even @Dave_Perkins can understand:
I don’t think
Thinking is hard. Why bother? (I think)
everyone in the paleo world
There are people riding dinosaurs (and stomping around in the mud to leave footprints next to dinosaur footprints). Those are the people in Paleo World. General Admission tickets go on sale in February.
that idea is looking less and less and less
That idea used to look a lot. But now it doesn’t look quite so much.
There are still a few paleontologists who think that feathers evolved because they were useful for flight (I think, but maybe they’ve all given up). But the evidence is pretty overwhelming that some critters had feathers before any of them had wings. If that is the time sequence, then feathers were eventually useful for evolving flight, but they evolved in the first place because they had some other advantage.
