66-Million-Year-Old Feather in Dinosaur Dung Offers Clues to Bird Survival
Updated
Updated · Good News Network · Sep 14
66-Million-Year-Old Feather in Dinosaur Dung Offers Clues to Bird Survival
3 articles · Updated · Good News Network · Sep 14
Summary
A feather preserved in dinosaur dung has given researchers one of the best bird-feather fossils from the dinosaur age and a new clue to why only some birds survived the mass extinction 66 million years ago.
CT scans and mineral analysis showed the coprolite also contained fish scales and leg bones from a hesperornithiform—an aquatic, mostly flightless bird lineage that died out at the end of the Cretaceous.
Those are the first hesperornithiform feathers ever found, and their mix of modern-looking waterproof traits with smaller primitive fuzzy feathers suggests weaker insulation than in Neornithes, the lineage that survived the asteroid-triggered impact winter.
The Montana specimen was found in 2016, and the Current Biology study argues more museum coprolites should be CT-scanned in case they preserve similarly rare bird remains.