Dinosaur Feathers Found in Ancient Amber

What is interesting here is probably the proto-feathers / fuzz which might shed light on the evolution of feathers and whether late dinosaurs were fuzzy.

http://news.sciencemag.org/paleontology/2011/09/dinofuzz-fou...

einhverfr2• 13 years ago

It now looks like feathered dinosaurs were a lot more common than that though. Virtually all of the raptors (velociraptor, utahraptor, etc) are assumed to be feathered based on fossil evidence today. When I was in grade school the real breakthroughs were in the area of evidence of warm-blooded dinosaurs. More recently though, there have been a lot of breakthroughs suggesting feathers were much earlier than we had previously thought.

sambeau5• 13 years ago

Indeed.

I think what I was trying to point out is that this doesn't add weight to early dinosaurs being feathered. These feathers are from the same period as Velociraptors.

It's cool, its fascinating and it's mind-blowing that some of these feathers could be from Velociraptor-like creatures! It's also great science.

But I was guarding against people saying "proven: all dinosaurs had feathers" which is the inevitable route that some of the internet commentary will take.

callmeed• 13 years ago

Is this why the velociraptors at the San Diego Natural History Museum are fuzzy/furry? [1]

My dinosaur knowledge comes from Steven Spielberg so I was a little taken aback when I saw this last month.

[1]http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelbwelch/9294262181/

olalonde• 13 years ago

One step closer to Jurassic Park.

scoot• 13 years ago

So not knowing anything about genomics / evolution - what advantage might proto-feathers (and 'pre-proto-feathers' before them - if there is such a thing) have conveyed that caused them to become full feathers? How does any evolutionary advantageous feature get started?

terabytest• 13 years ago

I think features like this start off as mutations that don't cause an evolutionary disadvantage to the creature that bears them. After a few generations where they change a bit every time, they might actually become useful to the animal's survival and start evolving even faster. If they became disadvantageous at any point they'd probably become excluded because they'd make it harder for the animal to reproduce.

mhb• 13 years ago

They were obviously a superior adaptation for attracting a female ticklesaur.

InclinedPlane• 13 years ago

The same reasons why many flightless birds continue to have feathers. First off they are excellent insulation. That could be critical for a not fully thermoregulated organism. Dinosaurs are thought to be warm-ish blooded but it's possible they didn't have the kind of thermoregulation that modern birds or mammals do.

Add to that waterproofing, which can aid in thermoregulation as well. The phrase "like water off a duck's back" is quite apt, feathers can shed water better than a modern high tech coat. Keeping dry means keeping warm. Also, dinosaurs that were occasionally aquatic could have benefited from feathers.

And very fast moving dinosaurs could have used feathers to aid in aerodynamics, which would allow them to run faster and maintain greater control over their movements.

lambda2• 13 years ago

For one thing, evolution can sometimes work by going through several stages, of which the intermediate are not particularly useful but not harmful either. By mere chance, they happen to last long enough for the actually useful changes to build on top of them. For example, see Lenski's long term evolution experiment with e. coli.[1] He's spent 25 years breeding several populations of e. coli, and freezing samples every 500 generations or so (every 75 days). After about 20 years, he discovered that one of the strains had evolved the ability to metabolize citrate in an aerobic environment, which e. coli normally can't do. Going back to the historical record, unfreezing some of the past samples and repeating the experiment, he found that sample from after generation 20,000 could re-evolve this trait, but clones from before that time could not, indicating that there was a potentiating mutation that that particular strain had had shortly before generation 20,000, which the other samples did not have. Further evidence has shown that it may have actually been two separate potentiation mutations.

Beyond that, however, proto feathers would have probably been useful for insulation. They seem fairly similar to down feathers, which are great insulators. Given the the feathers were also colorful, they may also have been decorative, and used for catching the eye of potential mates.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escherichia_coli_long-term_evo...

andrewflnr2• 13 years ago

But we don't know that those potentiating mutations didn't have some kind of benefit on their own, so that doesn't do much for the question of how proto-feathers provide enough benefit to stick around and spread long enough for the next several million mutations to arrive and turn them into feathers. Is insulation adequate for that?

Dinosaur Feathers Found in Ancient Amber

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