Sjaldgæf 66 milljón ára gömul fuglsfjöður fannst í risaeðluskít
Vísindamenn hafa fundið einstaklega vel varðveitta fjöður í steingerðum risaeðluskít frá Hell Creek. Fundurinn veitir nýja innsýn í þróun fjaðra og hvernig sumar fuglategundir lifðu af hamfarirnar sem útrýmdu risaeðlunum.
A bird that was eaten and partially excreted by a dinosaur 66 million years ago has left behind the best-preserved feathers ever recovered by scientists from dinosaur-age rock. This pushes the evolution of feathers, like the ones on modern birds, back by 10 million years and may tell us more about why most birds didn’t survive the post-asteroid mass extinction.
In 2016, David DeMar, Jr at the University of Washington in Seattle was collecting fish fossils in north-eastern Montana’s Hell Creek Formation when he discovered a broken coprolite, a fossilised dropping, with a feather clearly visible along its fractured surface. Further analyses showed that the 9.3-millimetre-long primary feather had a water-repellent structure, similar to that of modern pelicans.
