It was little more than a decade ago at a meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in New York City that rumors of feathered dinosaurs from China were swirling in the halls between sessions. The presence of feathers on dinosaurs not only implied a direct relationship between dinosaurs and birds, but it also raised questions about Archaeopteryx, the earliest known bird, and what it means to be a bird.

Today, at another meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Bristol, UK, Dr. Xu Xing of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing announced the discovery of new geological formations in China, the Daohugou and Tiaojishan formations, that date to between 151 to 161 million years ago and contain more feathered dinosaur specimens. This announcement may bring what has been more than a decade of debate about dinosaur feathers and bird origins to a close. The reason is that one of the last remaining arguments used by opponents of the hypothesis that birds descended from dinosaurs was that the earliest bird, Archaeopteryx, actually predated the earliest feathered dinosaurs. That hurdle has now apparently been cleared. If the new dates for these beds are correct, they significantly predate Archaeopteryx, which lived around 150 to 145 million years ago. And there is no question that fossils found within these formations are feathered and very birdlike, particularly Anchiornis, a primitive troodontid.

A new tyrannosaurid, Raptorex, may help solve a long-standing mystery about when the arms of large carnivorous dinosaurs, such as T. rex,  became puny. (See Raptorex's full body below). Shown here is Raptorex’s skull reconstruction and a flesh model. All images courtesy of Paul Sereno. Photo © Mike Hettwer, courtesy of Project Exploration.

Today, a terrific new dinosaur specimen was announced by Paul Sereno and colleagues. It is Raptorex kriegsteini, a 3 meter-long, 65 kg. (10 feet long, 140 lbs.) tyrannosaurid found in 125 million years old sediments in China. Whereas other early relatives of Tyrannosaurus rex, such as Guanlong and Dilong, were small-bodied and had long arms, Raptorex was small-bodied with small arms like T. rex. What Sereno et al. propose in their paper is that tyrannosaurids evolved into their more familiar 10 to 13 meter-long, 4,000 to 7,000kg. (32 to 40 feet-long, 4.4 to 7.7 ton) form through a series of three stages, and that the trademark small forelimbs of T. rex evolved before the final stage, which was when tyrannosaurids evolved their gigantic sizes. This provides new evidence toward answering long-standing questions about  when and why short limbs evolved in large carnivorous dinosaurs, of which T. rex is just one example.

Ankylosaurs, Euoplocephalus, top, with it's relative, Edmontonia, below. Artwork by John Sibbick.

Built like an armored tank, it has been long-thought that ankylosaurs could pack a pretty mean wallop with the end of their tail club. But could an ankylosaur have caused enough damage trying to defend itself against, say, a T. rex? By using CT scans of a Euoplocephalus (a smaller and older relative of the well-known Ankylosaurus), University of Alberta researcher Victoria Arbour has found that a larger tail club could have fractured bone, whereas smaller tail clubs would have produced low-impact forces, but could not fracture bone. The tail club, when swung from side-to-side could have conveniently hit a T. rex’s ankles!

The feathers of extinct species hold color information. Shown here is a fossil bird specimen from the famous Messel quarry in Germany. Photo © Jakob Vinther.

In 1860 a single feather from the Solnhofen limestone quarry in Germany was the first evidence of Archaeopteryx, the now famous earliest-known bird. Last year, it was again a single feather, this time from Brazil, that a creative team from Yale University used to establish that pigment-bearing structures called melanosomes are preserved in some fossils.

The small paper by Jakob Vinther, Derek Briggs, and Richard Prum had thunderous implications. Not only were the visible patterns of feathers in fossils meaningful and related to pattern, but structures in fossils not visible to the naked eye could be used to infer color. The color of what? The color of feathers in extinct dinosaurs and birds. It is not a stretch to say that we are at the dawn of a new day in how we view the past. The colors of the prehistoric world, once left to the imaginations of paleoartists, will from this point on be knowable and based in science.

At least Will Ferrell is wearing the right kind of vest to be a paleontologist.

The new movie Land of the Lost stars Will Ferrell as paleontologist Rick Marshall, who invents a time machine that takes him to an alternate Earth where dinosaurs still dwell. Pop Omnivore wants to know: Does this film, based on a 1970s children’s TV show, do justice to paleontologists, not to mention dinosaurs?

For an expert opinion, we spoke with Thomas R. Holtz Jr., dinosaur paleontologist at the University of Maryland’s Department of Geology. (Warning: This interview contains spoilers—and references to poop and pee!)

Xu Xing, co-leader of the Xinjiang expedition, made his name on the feathered dinosaurs of Liaoning, but he's now searching for their origins in older sediments of the relatively unexplored far west of China. Photo courtesy of Jim Clark

China has been known for its fossil treasures for centuries. Yet, until the 20th century, the bones of ancient creatures were ground into powder for traditional medicine. Some of these fossils were thought to be dragons, and thus the medicine, whether mammal or dinosaur, was called “dragon bone.” Today the Chinese celebrate their fossil heritage not by eating it, but by studying it carefully and putting it on public display. Some towns are so famous for their fossils that huge statues of dinosaurs decorate their streets and town centers. Regional natural history museums are popping up everywhere. The transformation of Chinese attitude toward its fossil heritage in the last twenty years has been no less startling than the transformation of its cities, lifestyles, and economy (see NGM May 2008).

Dinosaur-related press coverage in the 1990s was punctuated, even dominated, by discoveries from Liaoning Province, an area now famous for feathered dinosaurs. In this month’s issue of National Geographic, you can read about a new region that is bursting onto the paleontology scene—Xinjiang Province. Well, let’s qualify that. It is not a really a “new” region because paleontologists have long known it to be rich in Mesozoic fossils. Expeditions had been there as early as the 1920s. A famous Chinese-Canadian expedition was there in the 1980s. Knowing the potential of the area, others, including NGS grantees Luis Chiappe, Paul Sereno, and Thomas Martin have been there since.

Our July magazine story features Jim Clark and Cathy Forster of George Washington University and Xu Xing of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology who launched a multi-year project in the Junggar basin. The Junggar basin, they knew, had rocks of Middle Jurassic age (the Jurassic is the middle period of the three periods of the Mesozoic era). Rocks of this age are rare, at least on land, so we have a big hole in our understanding of Middle Jurassic dinosaur species. They were particularly interested in finding the fossils of small theropods. These would hopefully provide more information about the origin of birds (Archaeopteryx, the earliest known bird, appears in the fossil record at around 150 million years ago, just after the Middle Jurassic).

I had the pleasure of participating in the Xinjiang expedition twice. I had an interest in finding primordial dino-bird fossils as well as a curiosity about Xinjiang.

Before I went there, I thought Xinjiang would be about as desolate a place as anywhere on Earth. After all, this is the home of the impenetrable Taklamakan desert, the Turfan depression (the lowest elevation on Earth after the Dead Sea), the Xinjiang mummies, and China’s nuclear testing ground. When I landed at the provincial capital of Urumqi (pronounced oo-roo-moo-chee), I was very surprised to find no tumbleweed, but shiny Toyota land cruisers, skyscrapers, and millions of people instead. The discovery of rich oil deposits, plus China’s policy of encouraging immigration to the province, had created a boom town.

Half a day’s drive from Urumqi, in the Junggar Basin, I found the Xinjiang I expected. Base camp was in the middle of a dry valley surrounded by equally dry mountains on three sides. It was reminiscent of the American Southwest, and some parts were as beautiful as the painted deserts there. There were no people there other than the expedition team.

Each morning we would eat breakfast and head off in different directions to look for fossils emerging from sediments. Many of the Chinese crew were technicians who were deployed assisting in extracting  huge blocks of fossils containing many specimens. It would take days with jackhammers and chisels to free the blocks and many men to roll the blocks onto trucks. Their work was quite dangerous.

Fossils were everywhere in this basin. We were tripping over bits of tritylodonts, a mammal-like reptile, and turtles. There were many sauropods as well, but their bones were most often found shattered. I spent my time wandering far from camp, looking for what I hoped would be an important specimen. I did not find any early birds, nor did anyone else, but I did find an important ancestor of crocs (which Clark and Xu unexpectedly named after me—Junggarsuchus sloani!) and a very early pterosaur.

Others on the expedition have found an incredible array of important Jurassic fossils, filling some important gaps in our understanding of what certain dinosaur groups looked like before the Cretaceous period have been filled. Those darn Jurassic dino-birds, however, remain to be found.

Above: Masiakasaurus was voted one of the most bizarre dinos by National Geographic editors for its weird forward-projecting teeth. This is an image of the computer model as it was taking shape. Art by Pixeldust Studios.

Which is your favorite bizarre dinosaur? For me, it's National Geographic magazine's December issue covergirl, Dracorex hogwartsia. What a great name! And what a mug!

Believe me. It was no simple task selecting which dinosaurs would make the cut as the most bizarre of the bizarre. Here's the group we ended up using in the article:

Deinocheirus, Amargasaurus, Carnotaurus, Dracorex, Spinosaurus, Masiakasaurus, Styracosaurus, Nigersaurus, Epidendrosaurus, Tuojiangosaurus, Parasaurolophus

One of these bizarre stars was also the subject of a press conference at National Geographic Society headquarters today. Explorer-in-Residence Paul Sereno announced new information about Nigersaurus, a dinosaur discovered in Niger that he has been studying for some years.

Are the creatures we picked really the most bizarre? I’m sure some of you may have a different opinion. Let's hear it. If you want to send in a picture, send it to stonesbonesnthings@gmail.com and I'll post it.

In December 2005, National Geographic magazine ran a story with gripping  computer-generated graphics of extinct marine reptiles, such as the nothosaur above. The story was six years in the making. © National Geographic

While weaving through the crowds of paleontologists at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s annual meeting in Austin, Texas today I had one of those “blast from the past” moments. It happened when I ran into Robin O’Keefe, an expert on plesiosaurs, a group of ocean-going reptiles that look a lot like the Loch Ness monster. I hadn’t seen Robin in six years or so, and seeing him reminded me of the long chain of events that led to the creation of National Geographic’s Sea Monsters IMAX movie that is now playing in theaters.

It all started way back in 1999 when the magazine decided it wanted to do a story on marine reptiles, the sea monsters that ruled the ocean while the dinosaurs ruled the land during the Mesozoic era (248 to 65 million years ago). This happened largely because we had just run a series of dinosaur stories and I felt that it was time to get other life forms into our paleontology mix. I convinced the Editor-in-Chief that we should break tradition and prepare all the artwork using state-of-the art computer graphics. This would be the first time that the magazine did not use paint to recreate prehistoric creatures. One argument I used was that after the success of Jurassic Park in bringing dinosaurs to life our audience might be enjoy seeing sea monsters in as realistic a way as possible, as if a natural history photographer had gone out and photographed them alive. The other argument was that computer graphics-generated animals would allow us to repurpose the animals for other media, including television, movies, the web, and books.

One of the first things we did was search our records to see what scientists National Geographic’s Committee for Research and Exploration had funded to do research on life in the oceans during the Mesozoic era. Quite a few names came up, including Olivier Rieppel, Betsy Nichols, Hans-Dieter Sues, Ryosuke Motani, Zulma Gasparini, and Robin O’Keefe. Our researchers, photo editors, and writers descended on these folks like a swarm of bees to get the project off to a good start and didn’t let up until our magazine article was finally printed as a cover story in December of 2005.

Right: In the speaker's preparation room at the SVP meeting in Austin, Robin O'Keefe points to a CT image of the gut contents of a plesiosaur that contains the remains of a juvenile icthyosaur, a dolphin-like marine reptile. Evidence of marine reptiles preying on other marine reptiles is extremely rare. Photo by author.

Robin had the distinction of being one of the first scientists we roped into helping us recreate digital models of the marine reptiles we selected. He and I flew to a computer graphics studio in Utah to check progress on the project. He spent a day or two helping the computer graphics guys input limits to the range of motion of limbs, spines, necks, and tails. Little did we know at that time how much work it was going to be before we had images we could print in National Geographic. It was arduous for everyone involved, but I have to say, looking back, that it was a great experience. The article was well-received and many of the art pieces won awards, including the difficult-to-win Lanzendorf Prize for paleo art from the Soceity of Vertebrate Paleontology. And it is also rewarding to see that those sea monster models that Robin and I worked on in Utah, even though they underwent many technical evolutions, have now fulfilled their full mission by appearing in the National Geographic Society’s full suite of media offerings, which includes print, television, the web, books, and now, seven years after the original concept was initiated, an IMAX film.

Did you see the movie? I’d love to hear your comments.

Greg Paul's prescient illustration of a Velociraptor with quilled arm feathers (on the left)  was prepared almost twenty years ago. © Gregory S. Paul

Isn’t it interesting that a high-power trio of scientists, Alan Turner of Columbia University , Pete Makovicky  of the Field Museum (an NGS grantee) and  Mark Norell of the American Musuem of Natural History have now identified quill knobs on a Velociraptor ulna (see Science )?

It was not so long ago that such a claim would have generated an outcry from a vocal minority of scientists who opposed the hypothesis of a bird-dinosaur link like Storrs Olson of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History and Alan Feduccia of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but I haven’t heard a peep, have you? I remember that Feduccia threatened to cancel his subscription to National Geographic he was so incensed with an article we published in 1998 on the dinosaurian origin of birds. I don’t know if he ever followed through on that, but when National Geographic published an article including “Archaeoraptor,” a fossil dino-bird that turned out to be a faked composite of two skeletons, he and his other colleagues of like mind screamed bloody murder (partly because they were suspicious of all “dinobirds,” but also because the creature had not yet been properly described in a scientific journal).

I have the dubious distinction of having written that article article back in November 1999 and remember distinctly the sharp tone of Storrs Olsen’s open letter which he sent to numerous scientists and which was reported heavily in creationist web sites as evidence against evolution. It was addressed to Dr. Peter Raven, chairman of the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration. I present here a couple choice bits from that letter:

“With the publication of "Feathers for T. rex?" by Christopher P. Sloan in its November issue, National Geographic has reached an all-time low for engaging in sensationalistic, unsubstantiated, tabloid journalism.”

and

“The idea of feathered dinosaurs and the theropod origin of birds is being actively promulgated by a cadre of zealous scientists acting in concert with certain editors at Nature and National Geographic who themselves have become outspoken and highly biased proselytizers of the faith. Truth and careful scientific weighing of evidence have been among the first casualties in their program, which is now fast becoming one of the grander scientific hoaxes of our age—the paleontological equivalent of cold fusion. If Sloan's article is not the crescendo of this fantasia, it is difficult to imagine to what heights it can next be taken.”

I don’t know what happened to vocal opposition of this sort. Olson, Feduccia and their colleagues were dutifully quoted by journalists in almost every news article on feathered dinosaurs back then. But as evidence to support the hypothesis has been pouring in, those opposing views quoted so often before in news media have trickled to nothing. So discoveries like the quill knobs on a Velociraptor are reported without mention of controversy.

Yet, this particular discovery should be controversial and generate discussion. Not because a dinosaur had feathers, but because it raises the nagging question of why a non-flying dinosaur had quilled feathers? Quilled feathers, as opposed to downlike “protofeathers” are necessary for flight in birds. There are the standard explanations for why they might appear in flightless dinosaurs: display, thermoregulation, and lift when running up inclines, for example, but another explanation is that quilled feathers are on Velociraptor because it was secondarily flightless, like penguins are today.

I’m sure that many paleontologists will remember that Greg Paul, who published Dinosaurs of the Air: The Evolution and Loss of Flight in Dinosaurs and Birds in 2002, has long argued that just because birds descended from dinosaurs doesn’t mean that the relationship can’t be reversed to produce flightless dinosaurs that descended from birds.

This new debate won’t be resolved anytime soon, but it will be interesting to hear the differing viewpoints. In the meantime, I’m interested in finding the earliest published illustration of Velociraptor that shows it with quilled arm feathers. What’s printed above is the earliest one I could find. It is by paleontologist Greg Paul and appeared in his book Predatory Dinosaurs of the World published in 1988. It is reprinted here with Greg's kind permission. Send anything you think might be earlier to stonesbonesnthings@gmail.com.

In the current issue of Nature you’ll find a much-awaited report on the bodies (as opposed to the heads) of the folks that lived at Dmanisi in Georgia (the former Soviet Republic) about two million years ago. The report was much-awaited because only the heads of four of the individuals discovered there have been thoroughly reported. That left many of us wondering what their bodies were like.

We knew their brains were small and early estimates of their height and weight showed they were small in body as well, but we didn’t have a good sense of their body proportions or skeletal details from the neck down. And the reason why we cared about their bodies so much was that a paradigm was about to be broken.