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Blobrana


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Beipiaosaurus
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Feathered dinosaur
A dinosaur that would have been covered with feathers has been discovered in China, adding to evidence that supports the theory that birds evolved from ancient reptiles. It is thought that the plant-eating dinosaur would have used the feathers to attract a mate.
Two types of feather were found on the animal's remains, and one that would have been used to signal to other creatures is the most primitive form yet seen in a dinosaur.
This feather is believed by researchers to have been used by the animal to signal its intentions to potential mates and as a means of warning off rivals.
The discovery of the elongated broad filamentous feathers has excited palaeontologists, who believed that such coverings existed but had never seen them.

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Blobrana


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Archaeopteryx
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A scientist will use the latest technology to put flesh on the bones of a 150m-year-old dinosaur.
Powerful X-rays will allow researchers to create a detailed image of the fearsome Archaeopteryx from a long dead fossil.
The flying dinosaur, whose Greek name means ancient wing, is believed to be an early ancestor of birds.
Researchers will produce the clearest image yet of the creature by using high-energy radiation to detect traces of long dead flesh, bone and feathers.
Palaeontologist Phil Manning, from Manchester University, is part of the team who will put the fossilised remains of the dinosaur in front of the ultra-high powered Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource in California.

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Blobrana


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Feathered dinosaurs
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A mild-mannered Chinese professor is being hailed as the world's greatest palaeontologist for his part in the discovery of 30 new species of dinosaurs over the past 15 years.
Now China hopes Xu Xing's work will help attract a new kind of tourist to China - one for whom a fossilised raptor holds more appeal than the country's millennia of history and culture.

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Blobrana


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Archaeopteryx lithographica
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Charles Darwin famously declared that the origin of flowering plants was an "abominable mystery": The highly modified structure and reproductive habits of the angiosperms set them apart from all other plants and, until recently, confounded attempts to identify the common ancestor of roses, grasses and oak trees. However, Darwin's adage might equally well have been applied to many other plant and animal groups with specialised and idiosyncratic anatomy or an incomplete fossil record.
In 1860, just one year after publication of On the Origin of Species, a 150-million-year-old fossila finely detailed impression of a single featherwas found in Solnhofen, Germany. The following year the same strata yielded a nearly complete skeleton of a feathered animal that would become an icon of evolutionthe earliest known bird, Archaeopteryx lithographica.

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Blobrana


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Mahakala omnogovae
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An 80-million-year-old fossil recently uncovered in the Gobi desert could be a key piece of the evolutionary puzzle of how massive dinosaurs gave rise to today's comparatively tiny birds, palaeontologists say.
The newfound species, dubbed Mahakala omnogovae, measures just 70 centimetres from its head to the tip of its feathered tail.

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Blobrana


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Palaeontologists have long theorised that miniaturisation was one of the last stages in the long series of changes required in order for dinosaurs to make the evolutionary "leap" to take flight and so become what we call birds. New evidence from a tiny Mongolian dinosaur, however, may leave some current theories about the evolution of flight up in the air.
A team of researchers including Dr. Julia Clarke, assistant professor of palaeontology at North Carolina State University with a joint appointment at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, studied the new dinosaur species Mahakala omnogovae and its relationships to other small meat-eating dinosaurs including birds. They found that small size was held in common among early species within the two dinosaurian lineages most closely related to birds and was evolved well before the ability to fly. Further, the dinosaurs within each lineage did not get uniformly smaller as time went on; in fact, in some lineages dinosaurs' size increased by a factor of three.
Their results are published in the Sept. 7 edition of the journal Science.

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An 80-million-year-old dinosaur fossil unearthed in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia demonstrates that miniaturisation, long thought to be a hallmark of bird origins and a necessary precursor of flight, occurred progressively in primitive dinosaurs.
The find, described in the September 7 issue of the journal Science, is made up of the fossilised bones of a new dinosaur the researchers have named Mahakala, and includes portions of its skull, forelimb and hind limb, as well as much of the vertebral column.
Mahakala is an early evolutionary offshoot of the group of carnivorous dinosaurs known as dromaeosaurids that also includes the agile, sickle-clawed Velociraptor made famous in the 1993 movie Jurassic Park.

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Blobrana


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Argentavis magnificens
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Title: Ancient Argentavis soars again
Authors: David E. Alexander

Approximately 6 million years ago, in what is now Argentina, an enormous bird ranged across the region from the Andes Mountains to the pampas. Imagine a bird that has a condor-like body, weighs as much as a person, and has a wingspan nearly that of a small airplane. Imagine further that this bird has a 55-cm-long skull with a massive, eagle-like beak large enough to swallow a rabbit whole. Argentavis magnificens, the giant teratorn, fits this description. In addition to the general fascination stimulated by any huge (but safely extinct) carnivore, the fossils of this bird present palaeontologists with a number of questions. Did it fly? If so, was it a flapper like a goose or a soarer like its relatives, the condors? Some of the questions about the flight in this huge bird have now been answered by computer models described in this issue of PNAS by Chatterjee et al.  Thanks to this work, we now have a clearer picture of the flight abilities of this extinct creature.
Argentavis is a member of Teratornithidae, a family of large, extinct birds. Although only partial skeletons of Argentavis have been found, they are very similar in general plan and proportion to Teratornis merriami, a smaller teratorn well known from >100 specimens collected at the Rancho La Brea tar pits in southern California. Earlier estimates put the mass of Argentavis at {approx}80 kg , but Chatterjee et al.  used a more sophisticated multivariate analysis to arrive at an estimated body mass of 70 kg. A good estimate of mass is critical because overall weight has a crucial effect on flight characteristics like airspeed.

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Blobrana


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The largest bird known to have taken to the skies would have been a remarkable glider, scientists say.
A North American team has studied the flight abilities of Argentavis magnificens, which lived six million years ago in Argentina.
With its seven-metre  wingspan, the animal must have been an expert at riding thermals and updrafts.
But, the team tells PNAS journal, at 70kg  it might have struggled to get airborne by flapping its wings.

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Blobrana


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Giant Teratorn
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Weighing in at 150 pounds or more, the all-time biggest bird couldn't just hop into the air and fly away, researchers say. A team led by Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University used computer programs originally designed for aircraft to analyse the probable flight characteristics of Argentavis magnificens, a giant bird that lived in South America 6 million years ago. Like today's condors and other large birds, Argentavis would have had to rely on updrafts to remain in the air.
Doing so, it could have soared for long distances, they conclude in a paper in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Blobrana


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gigantoraptor erlianensis
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Chinese archaeologists have discovered a the remains of gigantic bird-like dinosaur in the Gobi Desert in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, which could overturn theories that dinosaurs became generally smaller as the evolved into birds.
The animal, named gigantoraptor erlianensis, is believed to have been about eight meters in length, weighed 1,400 kg, and stood up to five metres high.
Chinese archaeologists said that despite its enormous size, gigantoraptor erlianensis belonged to the oviraptorosauria, a group of smaller, feathered animals.
Living more than 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period, this big bird precursor has complicated the seemingly shrinking descent from Archaeopteryx to the modern sparrow.

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