Feathers!
by David Atkins
Here's an amazing fossil find of yet another feathered dinosaur, strongly suggesting that not just some but most dinosaurs had feathers:
The discovery of a fantastically preserved, bushy-tailed fossil theropod has cloaked the dinosaur world in feathers.
Named Sciurumimus -- Latin for "squirrel-mimic" -- albersdoerferi, the dinosaur lived 150 million years ago in what is now Germany. When it died, it came to rest in sediments so fine-grained that they preserved an almost photographic impression of the filaments covering its body.
Other feathered theropods, the taxonomic clade including all two-legged dinosaurs and their bird descendants, have been found previously, inspiring fantastic artist renditions and speculation that plumes rather than scales were the dinosaur norm.
Those fossils, however, belonged to a relative latecomer group known as coelurosaurs. Whether most theropods were feathered, or just a few recent evolutionary offshoots, was an open question. The new fossil find, described July 3 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and led by paleontologist Oliver Rauhut of Germany's Ludwig Maximilian University, gives a resounding answer.
Compared to the coelurosaurs, S. albersdoerferi was "significantly more basal in the evolutionary tree of theropods," or a trunk rather than a branch, wrote Rauhut and colleagues. If it had feathers, so did the rest of the theropods.
Some people believe that if a bearded guy in the sky didn't hand-fashion all living beings from dust, the world would lose its sense of wonder. As for me, knowing all my childhood and Hollywood conceptions of dinosaurs were wrong, and that my cockatiel and lovebird aren't just feathered dinosaurs but more like actual dinosaurs with significant adaptions--that is a source of wonderment far greater than any monolithic supernatural entity could create.
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