Velociraptor Had Feathers 189
Spy der Mann writes "A new look at some old bones have shown that velociraptor, the dinosaur made famous in the movie Jurassic Park, had feathers. A paper describing the discovery, made by paleontologists at the American Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum of Natural History, appears in the Sept. 21 issue of the journal Science."
Re:Is this news? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Queue XKCD comic (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Missing Link? (Score:4, Informative)
Some dragons are drawn with feathers instead of scales. It looks pretty good.
The problem seems to be people keep imagining that those feathers are same as present day feathers, and brightly colored. In fact, the Discovery raptors had brightly colored feathers which didn't make any sense for a carnivore.
I would expect more subdued hues, lots of gray and brown, so they are not as noticeable to their pray.
In fact, from some distance, it wouldn't look much different compared to scales, it'll just be somewhat less shiny.
Re:Is this news? (Score:2, Informative)
The full article by Turner et al. can be found here [sciencemag.org] in Science.
Looking at the pictures, the features are quite suggestive, and the structures are in the right place, but I'm not 100% convinced. If the interpretation is correct, though, these sorts of structures could be found on other specimens and in related species (according to the article, though, not all modern birds have these structures, so the distribution might be variable). I'm sure that this will be tested out fairly quickly by other workers.
Re:Is this news? (Score:5, Informative)
Your theory is almost correct, in that one could probably say the ostrich is just a small, stupid dinosaur.
If you want something a little more convincing than an ostrich, consider the cassowary; a six-foot tall bird that can run at 30 mph, jump 5 feet high, and swim well, with a 5-inch middle claw on each foot that the bird can and will use as a weapon, disemboweling a human with a single kick. They are intelligent, vicious when threatened, and cunning enough to outflank organized groups of humans they perceive as a threat.
Fortunately, they aren't carnivores.
Re:Not Velociraptor at all. (Score:1, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utahraptor [wikipedia.org]
maybe because of (Score:2, Informative)
Deinonychus was rechristened by some authors, which happens moreoften, like the all known Brontosaurus which is named Apatosaurus.
There have been renamings all along, including to believe in a species and revoking his own line. Happened to the Gorgosaurus, too. Depends which line of Paleonotology you follow, there was always big debate over such things from the beginning of this science.
No idea (Score:5, Informative)
- the fox, which is pretty darn red
- the tiger, which is relatively bright orange and with stripes too (and cats somewhat inherited that: a normal tabby male is almost always orange, though the females are nearly always grey when they're tabby.)
In fact, think about this: the most logical camouflage colour would be green, right? That's the colour we dress our soldiers in, right? Well, in practice mammals are coloured anything but green.
A hypothesis there is that camouflage doesn't always mean having the same colour as the surroundings. Three quarters of camouflage in the animal world seems to have to do more with the mental capacity of your opponent (prey or predator, as the case may be) than with blending in.
Primates have very evolved, arguably top-of-the-line image analysis and recognition capabilities. A lot of more primitive animals don't. For example, strange as it may seem to you, a lot of animals have trouble recognizing a snake as a snake. (In fact, one hypothesis is that a lot of the natural selection pressure for increasingly bigger brains in primates was... snake recognition.) A lot take "shortcuts" to save neurons, like mainly processing edges instead of whole shapes, or mainly seeing stuff that moves instead of analyzing the whole picture. A lot are nearly colour-blind, or have other primary colours for their vision than humans have. Some species (e.g., a lot of birds) don't even try to recognize another animal as a whole, but just look at where the eyes are: both in front for stereoscopic vision means predator, eyes on the sides means harmless herbivore. Etc.
So basically don't assume that what's piss-poor camouflage for _you_, also counts as such for another species. It may be actually _excellent_ camouflage in the environment that animal has to deal with.
E.g., lots of stripes and dots may look like begging for attention to you, but may severely overload the edge detection in more primitive species, by creating lots and lots and lots of extra edges, and thus prevent them from figuring out the whole.
E.g., the reason a lot of exotic fish are orange, yellow and red, is because those frequencies get absorbe the fastest in water. If you go deep enough, pretty much all available light is... blue. So you don't really need to colour yourself black, you only need to absorb blue. A simpler and cheaper to produce pigment can serve the same purpose and achieve the same effect.
E.g., a big tail like that of the pheasant may look like an unexplainable handicap, until you realize that most animals have a very simplified way of judging how big an opponent is. They only judge how big the image looks, not try to reconstruct the 3D animal in their brain and judge the size that way. There's a reason cats puff up and turn sideways when they might need to fight. To _you_ it's the same cat turned sideways, but to more simple-brained animals (apparently including other cats) it just became a lot larger and thus more dangerous. Or to the same animal you might look like a lot of an easier prey if you crouch or sit than if you stand up. So, depending on what predators it had to evolve with, being able to fan a giant tail can actually act as a deterrent.
So basically, we probably can't extrapolate what the raptors' plumage looked like. It probably depends a lot on the environment, and on how their prey's brain worked. And given the many millions of years involved, I wouldn't be surprised if it changed over time as their environment and prey evolved.
Re:Is this news? (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeopteryx [wikipedia.org]
Re:Not Velociraptor at all. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Is this news? (Score:2, Informative)
Almost as big as an ostrich and very unpredictable and dangerous
The wicked claw is the main threat but don't forget the boney head
going crashing through the jungle at automobile speeds.
Some villagers would keep them as pets till they got old and turned on somebody.
Guess they didn't have any pet tigers to get mauled by so they had to make do with a gigantic bird.
The salt water croks and the cassowaries were definately at the top of the food chain on the island and were the two largest animials.
So feathered dinosaurs can be scary.
Not exactly news (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not Velociraptor at all. (Score:4, Informative)
I thought the general consensus was that the JP "Velociraptor" was definitely to big for a Velociraptor and probably a bit too big for Deinonychus, and probably most similar in size and body plan to Utahraptor (though a bit small); at any rate, most likely, the CGI critter was designed based on Velociraptor and then scaled up till had the desired dramatic appearance on screen, so calling it "clearly" any particular bird is probably mistaken; it is a fictional creation based loosely on then-current ideas about Velociraptor adapted to fit a particular theatrical vision.
Actually, the "sickle claw" is a distinguishing feature of the family Dromosauridae of which Deinonychus, Utahraptor, Velociraptor, and a whole host of other relatives are members.