#bird-dino

[quarkmaster]

Hunted Herd

Bunch of hunters trying to make a kill. Poor little bird-dino

Lisa Plokker

[paleochick]

I see your true colors...

Meet, Anchiornis huxleyi

(Named in honor of Thomas Henry Huxley, an early proponent of biological evolution and the first to propose an evolutionary relationship between birds and dinosaurs.)

In my line of work, I often get a chance to look at beautiful fossils similar to this one. It's hard to look at something like this and not wonder what they looked like in life. What were their behaviors? What color were they in life?

A long long time ago in a place very far from here...a tiny feathered troodontid dinosaur died--for whatever reason--and fell into a shallow pool of mud. Little did the little dinosaur know that he would make a HUGE splash in the Homo sapiens scientific community. The conditions were just right for fossilization and "BAM!" this little dinosaur was preserved for 160 million years until it was uncovered in rock in Liaoning, China. Not only were the bones preserved, but also the feathers. (Ooooh) You can clearly see the exact placement of the feathers as if the animal had died recently.

Now, with modern scientific technology and ornithologist Richard Prum of Yale University, scientists have found a new way to bring these early "birds" pigmentation back to life--and in FULL color.

CLICK to see those beautiful reconstructed feathers!

TA-DA! What a beautiful little "bird"...

My academic background is rich in animal behavior, so of course I have to wonder...why THOSE colors? Color is specific and acts in very specific ways behaviorally:

-mating display?

-signaling?

-scaring up bugs/prey?

-fancy hair-do?

Here's a lovely modern bird called the Black Woodpecker (Dryocopus martius) which looks strikingly similar--without the white wing bars--and without teeth. Just looking at Anchiornis it probably couldn't climb trees or peck the same way as a woodpecker--but the colors are similar:

Anchiornis is also a dead-ringer for the Eurasian Hoopoe (Upupa epops) The diet of the Hoopoe is mostly composed of insects, although small reptiles and frogs as well as some plant matter such as seeds and berries are sometimes eaten. I imagine that Anchiornis' diet is VERY similar, if not the same, as the Hoopoe. A small troodontid with a small mouth and small teeth would be very efficient at eating bugs and frogs like the hoopoe, even though their mouths are different:

It's been a VERY exciting year (so far) for paleontology...and hopefully more to come. This groundbreaking technology is going to crank out some very beautiful (and unusual) fossil specimens in the future. I can only begin to imagine the realm of possibilities...

HOW did they do it?

Read the article below for more information. Thanks to National Geographic!

<3 Paleochick

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For more information about Anchiornis huxleyi visit:

http://www.nationalgeographic.com

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/02/photogalleries/100204-dinosaur-true-color-full-body-pictures/

National Geographic, "True-Color Dinosaur Pictures: First Full-Body Rendering"

Feb 4, 2010

"In the Beijing Museum of Natural History, the team behind the new study in Science, co-led by Yale University's Jakob Vinther, found an Anchiornis skeleton (pictured) preserved in an ochre-colored slab of mudstone. With fossilized "protofeathers" bursting from the bones in every direction—and faint evidence of dark and light markings—the fossil was an ideal target for researchers seeking prehistoric melanosomes,pigment-bearing organelles within feathers. The microscopic particles were first found preserved in a fossil—in this case, a prehistoric bird—by Vinther and his team in 2008. The particles had previously been interpreted in fossils as bacteria.

In modern birds, different types of melanosomes are known to produce different colors in feathers. Eumelanosomes are rodlike and are associated with the colors black and gray. Phaeomelanosomes are round and produce colors ranging from reddish brown to yellow. A lack of melanosomes makes white."

"Anchiornis's complicated pattern of reddish brown, black, gray, and white feathers may have been useful in attracting mates or some form of visual communication, as is often the case in living birds, researchers speculate. The new find's implications for the evolution of feathering and flight are "striking," said study co-author Julia Clarke, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Texas in Austin.

Anchiornis shows that, "when elongate feathers first appear [in the fossil record], they are already distinctively spotted and striped," Clarke said. "We now have patterns within individual feathers in dinosaurs long before we get some kind of aerial locomotion."

Ornithologist Richard Prum of Yale University added that "a more likely function"—other than flight—"for both the crown and limb feathers of Anchiornis is communication or signaling. "This could have been in lots of contexts, including sexual display, territoriality, et cetera," Prum said. "It could also have been like modern redstarts, which use their bright wing and tail patches to scare up insects, which [the birds] then seize in flight."