This Dinosaur Had Feathers and Probably Flew Like a Chicken
Since then, researchers have pored over every detail of available specimens, trying to puzzle out how birds came to fly. So you might expect that such a well-studied fossil species wouldn't be capable of surprises. But in a new paper, a team led by Jingmai O'Connor, a paleontologist at the Field Museum in Chicago, revealed previously unrecorded soft tissues and skeletal details from a new specimen, known as the Chicago Archaeopteryx. What they found also helps explain why some feathered dinosaurs got off the ground, if only for short-haul flights.
Many Archaeopteryx specimens are too flattened by geology to discern important skeletal details. The latest specimen, acquired by the Field Museum in 2022, let O'Connor's team address some of the anatomical uncertainties.
Unlike other specimens, the bones of the Chicago Archaeopteryx were preserved in three dimensions, allowing the researchers to better evaluate the skull's palate. That showed the earliest signs of an evolutionary trajectory toward the skulls of modern birds. In another accident of fossilization, the carcass's wings were separated from the body, leaving them 'pristinely preserved.' The team confirmed that rather than having two layers of wing feathers, Archaeopteryx actually had three. In modern birds, that third layer helps link the shorter forearm to the body to create a continuous lift surface, which allows for sustained flight. — ASHER ELBEIN / NYT
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Observer
15-07-2025
- Observer
Fiona the Pregnant Sea Reptile's Fossil Hints at the Birth of a New Ocean
About 131 million years ago, a pregnant ichthyosaur — a dolphin-like reptile of the dinosaur era — swam in seas that are now part of southern Chile. And then she died. An accomplice in the killing: the breakup of the southern supercontinent of Gondwanaland. South America, once unified with Africa and Antarctica, pulled away, and a new ocean basin called the Roca Verdes opened up. 'One of the hypotheses is that this is actually the opening of the early South Atlantic Ocean,' said Matthew Malkowski, a professor of geological sciences in Texas. The geological forces that pulled apart the continents also ruptured the Earth's crust, causing volcanoes and earthquakes, and those earthquakes sometimes set off massive underwater landslides. One day in the early Cretaceous period, one of those landslides collapsed down a submarine canyon in Roca Verdes, generating turbulent flows of sediment. 'Probably these landslides might have trapped the ichthyosaurs and threw them to the bottom of the canyon and covered them with sediment,' said Judith Pardo-Pérez, an associate professor in Chile. — KENNETH CHANG / NYT
Observer
21-06-2025
- Observer
This is easy to solve
Middle East peace, climate change, Ukraine — if Sisyphus were assigned one of today's global problems, he'd plead to be returned to rock rolling. So let's focus for a moment on a global challenge that we can actually solve: starvation. I suspect that some Americans — perhaps including President Donald Trump — want to slash humanitarian aid because they think problems like starvation are intractable. Absolutely wrong! We have nifty, elegant and cheap solutions to global hunger. Consider something really simple: deworming. I'm travelling through West Africa on my annual win-a-trip journey, in which I take a university student along on a reporting trip and every day we see children plagued by worms that aggravate their malnutrition. Nutrients go to their parasites, not to them. While worms are worthy antagonists — a female worm can lay 200,000 eggs in a day — aid agencies can deworm a child for less than $1 a year. This makes them stronger, less anemic and more likely to attend school. Researchers have even found higher lifetime earnings. In the US, we spend considerable sums deworming pets; every year I spend $170 deworming my dog, Connie Kuvasz Kristof. Yet deworming the world's children has never been as high a priority as deworming pets in the West, so we tolerate a situation in which 1 billion children worldwide carry worms. My win-a-trip winner, Sofia Barnett of Brown University and I are reminded in every village we visit of the toll of hunger. Malnutrition leaves more than one-fifth of children worldwide stunted, countless millions cognitively impaired and vast numbers (especially menstruating women and girls) weak from anemia. Malnutrition is a factor in 45 per cent of child deaths worldwide. A health worker weighs a baby at a clinic in Bombali District, Sierra Leone. NYT file photo Yet we also see how these deaths can be inexpensively prevented. In one Sierra Leone clinic, we met a 13-month-old boy, Abukamara, with sores and stick limbs from severe malnutrition. His mother, Mariatu Fornah, invited us to her village deep in the bush. The family is impoverished and struggling. The parents and four children share a mattress in a thatch-roof mud-brick hut with no electricity, and no one in the family had eaten that day, even though it was early afternoon. Fornah is doing what she can. She spent her entire savings of $3 and traded away a dress to get a traditional herb remedy for Abukamara, and she made the long trek to the clinic to get help. And there she found it — in the form of a miracle peanut paste. The clinic gave her a supply of the peanut paste, one foil packet a day and it will almost certainly restore Abukamara. This peanut paste contains protein, micronutrients and everything a child's body needs, plus it tastes good and costs just $1 per child per day. Known by the brand name Plumpy'Nut or the ungainly abbreviation RUTF, for ready-to-use therapeutic food, it has saved millions of children's lives over the years. Trump's closure of the United States Agency for International Development led to the cancellation of orders for RUTF and 185,535 boxes of it are piled up in the warehouse of Edesia Nutrition, according to the firm's founder and CEO, There are other inexpensive nutritional steps that could save many lives and some are astonishingly low-tech. Optimal breastfeeding could save up to 800,000 lives a year, The Lancet estimated, with no need for trucks, warehouses or refrigeration. Vitamin A supplementation would save lives, as would food fortification (adding nutrients to common foods). Promoting orange-flesh sweet potatoes over white-flesh ones would help, because orange ones have a precursor of vitamin A. Encouraging healthier crops like beans and millet rich with iron, rather than, say, cassava would help as well. Investments in nutrition — along with others in vaccines and in treating diarrhea, pneumonia and other ailments — help explain why fewer than half as many children die before the age of 5 now as in 2000. Yet after leading the world in fighting malnutrition, the US may be surrendering the field. America used to be the world's leading backer of nutrition, but the US government did not even send a formal delegation to the 2025 Nutrition for Growth summit, a conference held every four years. The US was expected to host the next summit, but now that's not clear. In my journalistic career, I've seen children dying from bullets, malaria, cholera and simple diarrhea, but perhaps the hardest to watch are kids who are starving. Their bodies have sores that don't heal, their hair falls out and their skin peels. By that point, even nourishing food doesn't always bring them back. What is most eerie is that such children don't cry or protest; they are impassive, with blank faces. That's because the body is fighting to keep the organs functioning and refuses to waste energy on tears or protests. Their heads don't move, but their eyes follow us silently, presumably wondering if we will care enough to ease their pain. Mr. Trump, will we? — The New York Times
Observer
16-06-2025
- Observer
Ancient Trees, Dwindling in the Wild, Thrive on Sacred Ground
The Putuo hornbeam, a hardy tree that thrives in the damp air by the East China Sea, could be easily overlooked by visitors to the Huiji Temple on an island in Zhejiang province. The tree has an unremarkable appearance: spotty bark, small stature and serrated leaves with veins as neatly spaced as notebook lines. But as far as conservationists can tell, no other mature specimen of its species is alive in the wild. The holdout on the island, Mount Putuo, has been there for about two centuries. And according to a study published in the journal Current Biology, its setting may have been its salvation. The study found that religious sites in eastern China have become refuges for old, ancient and endangered trees. Buddhist and Taoist temples have long sheltered plants that otherwise struggled to find a foothold, including at least eight species that now exist nowhere else on Earth. 'This form of biodiversity conservation, rooted in cultural and traditional practices, has proved to be remarkably resilient,' said Zhiyao Tang, a professor of ecology at Peking University and one of the study's authors. The trees survived at religious sites partly because they were planted and cultivated there. The report noted that Buddhism and Taoism emphasize spiritual association with plants and the temples tended to be left undisturbed, shielding the areas from deforestation. — JACEY FORTIN / NYT
