Freitag, 17. Januar 2020

Dancing dragon shows feathers grew differently on dinosaurs and birds – Yahoo News

Wulong’s fossil, uncovered in Liaoning Province in northeastern China, consists of a total skeleton as well as soft tissues like plumes hardly ever protected in such detail. With the feathers and claws, I think it would have been beautiful and simply a little bit scary.”I don’t believe we understand yet how it used its plumes,” Poust stated. They may delay getting their adult plumes for a long time. This is quite different from living birds and informs us that these decorative feathers preceded adulthood in dinosaurs.

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON, Jan 17 (Reuters) – A splendid fossil of a fierce little Chinese dinosaur called the “dancing dragon” that lived 120 million years ago – an older cousin of the Velociraptor – is showing scientists that feathers grew differently on dinosaurs than on birds.

The two-legged Cretaceous Period dinosaur, called Wulong bohaiensis, was a bantamweight meat-eater – a bit bigger than a crow – living in a lakeside environment, scientists stated. It had a flaky face, a mouth full of pointy teeth and one particularly harmful toe claw, and probably hunted little mammals, lizards, birds and fish.

Wulong’s fossil, discovered in Liaoning Province in northeastern China, includes a total skeleton in addition to soft tissues like feathers rarely maintained in such detail. Its long arms and legs each had sets of plumes that looked similar to those on bird wings, while most of the rest of its body was covered by fluffy filaments.

At the end of its long, bony tail – merged into a stiff rod – were two long plumes.

“The specimen of Wulong is a beautiful fossil. With the plumes and claws, I believe it would have been beautiful and just a little bit frightening. I ‘d like to see one alive,” said San Diego Natural History Museum paleontologist Ashley Poust, who led the research study released this week in the Anatomical Record journal.

“I do not believe we understand yet how it utilized its feathers,” Poust said. “It appears most likely that they aided with temperature guideline and signaling to other animals, but what this would have appeared like and just how much these functions mattered remains uncertain.”

Birds developed from small feathered dinosaurs roughly 150 million years ago. There were many feathered dinosaurs that did not fly, like Wulong. Researchers are excited to comprehend the plumage differences between birds and these feathered dinosaurs.

A close examination of bones revealed this Wulong person was about a years of age, a juvenile still growing.

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