In the Boston Globe today, there is an article about a new exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History. The show relflects new information learned from the wealth of intact fossils recovered from an ancient landslide in Mongolia. Raptor was covered in a complete coat of very fine feathers. Like an ostrich. I don't know how a feel about this. Anton "you mean they were like a giant turkey" - Jurassic Park

Yeah they showcased that on Discovery channel last night. The raptor had 8 inch long feathers and they showed it fossiled including eyes and internal organs. They speculated that feathered raptors may not have been that uncommon.

Huh, The recent Discover speculates that dinosaurs at large may have been more birdlike than we are accustomed to thinking. Interesting.

Bob Bakker proposed feathered dinosaurs as far back at 1986 in his book The Dinosaur Heresies. I highly recomend it to anyone, despite the fact that the statistics presented are suspect.

Here's a question. How did the Stegosaurus have sex?

Very carefully!

I'm picturing a T-Rex with a peacock tail.

Wow, this changes my whole concept of the critters. I'd like to see more info on that. Very interesting. Melanie

So, now we have to re-do the raptor texture, right?

George is going to be very upset. Ohhhh. Now this could be too much fun. We could make an image of what we think Mr. Raptor should look like with our new info. Where is Legume? He would do something like this. I see visions of "Kentucky Fried Raptor" ads and "The NBC Velociraptor". Such a sad thing to happen to such a noble animal. So in the mean time. . . question. Do you think Velociraptor taste like chicken? and..... Do you think Jurassic Park would have been so succesful if everyone was being chased about by giant turkeys with teeth?

Not only will you consider the dinosaur's differently, but now take another good long look at the motion of birds as they walk around. Put'em in slo-mo and sure'nuff - itty-bitty dino decendants.

Just keep in mind that only smaller animals are brightly colored. Really large animals (whales,sharks, elephants,crocodiles, Komodo dragons, tend to be brown or gray. Very large birds, like the ostrich, aren't as gorgeous as the peacock- the only exception being the cassowary. Very brightly colored head, has stiletto blades on its feet much like a raptor. Known to run around disembowling natives.

ROTFLMAO at the thought of Kentucky Fried Velociraptor. Just how many pieces would you get in a bargain bucket and how big would the bucket have to be? Paul

I always thought the name "Velociraptor" was strange - a raptor is a hunting bird. With this news it makes sense - the Apteryx, far from an aberration, was a natural evolution of saurian pterasaur to avian bird-forms. Sorry. Just babbling. I do that sometimes.

No, No, No, you've got it all wrong, guys! It was just a prank played by the velociraptor's dino friends. They dropped him in a tar pit, then covered him in feathers... The poor guy suffocated from the tar (their brains weren't big enough to forsee that and take precautions) and was fossilized in that sad state. Rosh <-- Gotta take the other side. =)

Sadly, Rosh's statement is no less silly than some I've heard. My "favorite" is that there were no Dinosaurs; the bones were created by Satan to trick us into thinking we weren't the first creatures on the world.

I don't think they were blue Either, but the texture was lying around.

It looked nice, I would just hate to see the idea of dinosaurs as birds of paradise get out of control, as it does from time to time.

Cool news! RE: Charlie Brown. The Earth was made around 4000 BC at 4:55 PM on a Friday. Actually Satan was on vacation in Bahamas (he was the first tourist) during that time. He had some summer interns (about 5 million of em)that got the job of distributing Dino fossils-:-) He used Interns to avoid paying em-and the tax issues. Musta been quite a job! Can you imagine the logistics and paperwork involved?? :-) Eric

I like your blue raptor, Anton. BTW, Wayne Barlowe has been painting raptors with feathers for years. Just saw the Chicago unveiling of Sue the Tyrannosaur on TV. The T rex has a wishbone! A 45 foot long, eight ton chicken is disturbing enough, but how big was the creature that could actually use that wishbone?

I'm picturing a T-Rex with a peacock tail. Feathers that size could not stand up. Likely only small theropods had feathers. Duckbills (= hadrosaurs) are known to have had scaly skin. Over a certain size of animal the feathers would not keep the animal warm much but would merely act as shelter for skin vermin, and the animal would evolve to have scaly skin, same as elephants and hippos have no fur. Likeliest Tyrannosaurus had scaly skin.

Perhaps feathers did not go as far as in the book "In the Presence of Dinosaurs", which even shows Eoraptor and Coelophysis with feathers!

It makes you wonder why pteranodon doesn't seem to have feathers. Or maybe there were other varieties of them (maybe in northern regions) that did? Who knows? Wouldn't it be fun to hop into a time machine and go back to get a look at these critters? Melanie

Pterosaurs had fur. There are fossils to prove it.

Fur! Wow! That's wild. I'm working on a fiction series in which my characters are transported to Pangaea, but in an alternate dimension, where extinct animals coexist with humans. In it, I have two varieties of pteranodons one with feathers, one with none. This is interesting news. I'll have to edit a bit to make it more accurate. Thanks for the info, Anthony. I'll have to do a little further research to see the fossils (assuming they have pictures). Oh well, my stories take place in an alternate universe where evolution took a different turn, so feathers could have developed on theirs. Literary license. ;) Melanie

the first pterosaur fossil that showed signs of fur was a Russian discovery called Sordes pilosus. The whole group was called pterosaurs. Pteranodon is one genus of pterosaurs; there were many other genera of them also.

Cool! You've really got me interested. I'll have to look up some info on it. Thanks for the tip. Melanie

Attached Link: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dinosaur

Great! Thanks. Melanie