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Blobrana


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Microcaptor gui
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Scientists believe modern birds are descended from dinosaurs, and examples of feathered dinos have been found dated to 120 million years ago.
In an effort to determine the flight abilities of the animals, researchers built models of these early birds and launched them into the air.
The result: They glide nicely.
The ancient bird, Microcaptor gui, had feathers on both its arms and legs. Fossils were found in China and a joint team from the University of Kansas and Northeastern University in China has been studying it in hopes of learning how bird flight began.
Since modern birds don't have flight feathers on their legs the researchers weren't sure how to position Microraptor's legs.
They report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science that they constructed a model of the animal with its hind legs in three different potential positions.

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Blobrana


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RE: Sleeping Dinosaur
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Dinosaurs' superior lungs may have allowed them to outcompete early mammals, according to a new study of modern-day alligators.
Scientists found that a method of high-efficiency breathing used by birds is also employed by today's alligators, which share a common ancestor with dinosaurs.
In mammals, each fresh breath carries oxygen-rich air to "cul-de-sacs" in the lungs called alveoli.
Air circulating through these sacs transfers oxygen into the bloodstream that picks up the blood's carbon dioxide waste.
But birds don't have alveoli. Instead, the air flows in one direction into the birds' air sacs.
This adaptation keeps birds' lungs filled with "fresh" air, allowing them to breathe at altitudes that would kill other animals.
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Blobrana


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Birds 'breathe like alligators'

Alligators and birds share a breathing mechanism which may have helped their ancestors dominate Earth more than 200 million years ago, in Triassic times.
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Blobrana


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Sinornithosaurus
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A bird-like dinosaur that prowled an ancient forest 125 million years ago used venom to subdue its prey, according to a new theory.
Sinornithosaurus's upper teeth resemble those of "rear-fanged" snakes which bite their prey and channel venom into the wound.
The dinosaur probably fed on the abundant birds which inhabited what is now north-east China.
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Blobrana


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Archaeopteryx
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Inside the first bird, surprising signs of a dinosaur
The raptor-like Archaeopteryx has long been viewed as the archetypal first bird, but new research reveals that it was actually a lot less "bird-like" than scientists had believed.
In fact, the landmark study led by paleobiologist Gregory M. Erickson of The Florida State University has upended the iconic first-known-bird image of Archaeopteryx (from the Greek for "ancient wing"), which lived 150 million years ago during the Late Jurassic period in what is now Germany. Instead, the animal has been recast as more of a feathered dinosaur - bird on the outside, dinosaur on the inside.

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Blobrana


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RE: Sleeping Dinosaur
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Origin of birds confirmed by exceptional new dinosaur fossils
Chinese scientists today reveal the discovery of five remarkable new feathered dinosaur fossils which are significantly older than any previously reported. The new finds are indisputably older than Archaeopteryx, the oldest known bird, at last providing hard evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs.

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Blobrana


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Anchiornis huxleyi
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Dinosaurs had 'earliest feathers'
Exceptionally well preserved dinosaur fossils uncovered in north-eastern China display the earliest known feathers.
The creatures are all more than 150 million years old.

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Blobrana


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Fossilised feather
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Known for their wide variety of vibrant plumage, birds have evolved various chemical and physical mechanisms to produce these beautiful colours over millions of years. A team of palaeontologists and ornithologists led by Yale University has now discovered evidence of vivid iridescent colours in feather fossils more than 40 million years old.
The finding, published online August 26 in Biology Letters, signifies the first evidence of a preserved colour-producing nanostructure in a fossilised feather.
Iridescence is the quality of changing colour depending on the angle of observation, such as the rainbow of colours seen in an oil slick. The simplest iridescent feather colours are produced by light scattering off the feather's surface and a smooth surface of melanin pigment granules within the feather protein. Examining feather fossils from the Messel Shale in Germany with an electron microscope, scientists have documented this smooth layer of melanin structures, called melanosomes.

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Fossil Colours



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Blobrana


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RE: Sleeping Dinosaur
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After years spent hunting for the buried remains of prehistoric animals, a Canadian palaeontologist now plans to manipulate chicken embryos to show he can create a dinosaur.
Hans Larsson, the Canada Research Chair in Macro Evolution at Montreal's McGill University, said he aims to develop dinosaur traits that disappeared millions of years ago in birds.
Larsson believes by flipping certain genetic levers during a chicken embryo's development, he can reproduce the dinosaur anatomy.
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Blobrana


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A new dinosaur unearthed in western China has shed light on the evolution from dinosaur hands to the wing bones in today's birds.
The fossil, from about 160 million years ago, has been named Limusaurus inextricabilis.
The find contributes to a debate over how an ancestral hand with five digits evolved to one with three in birds.
The work, published in Nature, suggests that the middle three digits, rather than the inside three, remain.

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