Caturday felid, now with dino!

Bruce Woollatt, who posts under the handle “Your name’s not Bruce?” won an autographed copy of WEIT by coining the term “faitheist.” I have had some correspondence with him, and learned that one of his avocations is dinosaurs. He has an artistic bent, too, and has built models of dinos for the Children’s Museum [...]

Preserved protein from an 80-million-year old dinosaur support the dinosaurian origin of birds

In this week’s Science we find a paper by Schweitzer et al. (total of 16 authors!) that has a quite remarkable result. (See the one page summary by Robert Service here.)  The upshot is that protein-sequence data from an 80-million-year old duckbilled dinosaur supports the dinosaurian origin of birds.
This story has a bit of a [...]

Feathered dinosaurs

by Greg Mayer
One of the most exciting developments in paleontology in the past ten years or so has been the discovery that many species of theropod dinosaurs had feathers.  The earliest discoveries were quite controversial.  At the 1997 meetings of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Chicago, a paper was read criticizing the interpretation of [...]

More on the evolution of flight

As I discuss in WEIT, the evidence shows that birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs–gracile, carnivorous beasts that walked on two legs. Some of the important evidence comes from Chinese fossils showing theropods with various types of feathers. The incipient stages of feather evolution appears to be filamentous feathers (T. rex might well have [...]