I just came accross this article in the _Science_ "hot news" updates from
yesterday. I presume an aticle is forthcoming in an upcoming issue of
Science but I copied the blurb and am posting it for anyones interest.
copied text from http://www.sciencenow.org/html/961021b.htm
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Dinosaurs: Our Fine Feathered Friends?
A fossil dinosaur in China appears to have had a mane of feathers running
down its neck, back, and tail--making it the first known feathered dinosaur
and giving scientists compelling evidence that
dinosaurs gave rise to birds.
Paleontologists got their first glimpse of the discovery last week at the
annual meeting of the Society of
Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New
York City. The late-breaking find, revealed in the hallways outside the
formal presentations, electrified the conference.
"What I saw in the photographs put me in an instant state of shock," says
Yale paleontologist John Ostrom.
The photos show what appear to be imprints of downlike feathers on a
complete Compsognathus skeleton, a chicken-sized dinosaur that lived about
125 million years ago. It's "definitely a dinosaur with feathers," claims
Philip J. Currie of the Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Canada, who has
seen the fossil, which was unearthed last summer in Laioning Province in
northeastern China. Currie and
Chen Pei-Ji of Peking University were showing the photos of the skeleton
at the conference. "It looks like disheveled hair that extends along both
sides of the back and tail," Currie says.
Ostrom and others have argued for years that dinosaurs were ancestors of
birds, based on skeletal similarities. But birds had one unique
feature--feathers. "We always thought feathered dinosaurs were possible,
but to find the real fossil is startling," says Peter Wellnhofer of the
Paleontological Museum in Munich, Germany. "It means that these small
carnivorous dinosaurs are linked to the origin of birds even more closely
than thought before."
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