http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/nation...inobird25.html

Its taken from the NY Times feed (the original article appears in Today's Times.

If I can find their redrawn evolutionary tree, I'd be curious to see their take on the new dino-bird relationship.

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"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel."

--Ambrose Bierce

http://threelittleboxes.com

A recent NOVA show had some very good related material including how the tree would shift. It sounds like your link may just be some reinforcements to the same ideas.

You may want to check it out, and lookup any references or key words from it.

NOVA: The Four-Winged Dinosaur

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

I hate to admit this...

But whenever I see Jurrasic Park or Dinosaur etc...

The dinosaurs always look... BALD to me...

They should have feathers...

Yeah, the paleontologists in the Department were interested in the article. I may get a second hand copy in a couple of days. Until then, I've got more than enough on my plate with Acid Mine drainage and Karst Hydrology :P

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"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel."

--Ambrose Bierce

http://threelittleboxes.com

Not all of em, just because they are related doesn't mean all dinos will have feathers. Most skin cast fossils, as far as I know, don't show feathers.

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True, but preservational bias favors the thick and the dense. This debate of which came first (metaphor) the chicken or the dino is one of the most interesting areas of paleontological research to me. I eagerly await each new episode.

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(By the way, I hate it that so many papers in the areas of planetary science and geology are not easily avaiable to the dreaded "non-subscribers". It is like they are screaming at me: "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH". Good, I feel better now.)

I know you are a person who takes his physics seriously, but isn't it said that most great discoveries aren't discovered with "Eureka!" but with, "Hmmm, that's funny." Big Don

Wonder what the mighty T-Rex would think of it's great-great-great-great-great..........great-great grandchildren, the Chickens?

Probably the same thing we do. Lunch.

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Spock Jenkins of the Vulcan Jenkins'.

On the flip side, I wonder what T. Rex meat tastes like?

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009

Well, dark meat, muscle, is for long duration activity, where as white meat is for sudden bursts of speed.

So, breast or thigh and extra crispy or roasted?

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(By the way, I hate it that so many papers in the areas of planetary science and geology are not easily avaiable to the dreaded "non-subscribers". It is like they are screaming at me: "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH". Good, I feel better now.)

I know you are a person who takes his physics seriously, but isn't it said that most great discoveries aren't discovered with "Eureka!" but with, "Hmmm, that's funny." Big Don

Really large animals can have more trouble getting rid of heat than holding it. Mass homeothermy; big objects cool off more slowly than small ones - surface/volume relationship. Elephants have no fur pelt because they don't need one. T Rex may have been the same, and I don't expect to ever see the fossil of a feathered brontosaurus (apatosaurus for those not attached to 'thunder lizard').

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The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

Don't forget, those were genetically tweaked theme park dinosaurs. Since the public expected scales, the zillionaire's scientists gave them scales.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Actually, the book even mentions that they had limits to how much modification they could do.

And for the record, I agree that a Brachiosaur with feathers doesn't line up.

I was referring to the Late Era small dinosaurs- which at that time, the vast majority of dinosaurs were not large. And likely many of them had feathers to some degree.

In fact, JS III gave that third movies raptors feathery appearance as opposed to the first movies snakelike appearance.

Really? I thought they only tweaked them to make them all female.

Indeed, they (the velociraptors) look like frogs or something. Gigantic, wrong species (Deinonychus), hands are totally wrong, flexible tail... I don't think I can watch the movie anymore.

The bigger dinosaur species were certainly featherless. AFAIK only duck-billed dinosaur skin impressions are found, and they show no feathers but scales. Which is sensible since they are only distantly related to maniraptorians and feathers would have been disadvantageous for a large animal.

Interestingly, although no evidence of fur has been found in the fossils of "mammal-like reptiles" (which were not reptiles, and in many ways more mammal-like than reptile-like), it is known they did not have scales. Maybe they actually had fur but the hairs were shed after death (cf. mammoth remains)? Anyway, there is some evidence that these critters had whiskers. Mammal-like indeed. Imagine furry little (and not at all so little) animals in the Permian, tens of millions of years before the first dinosaurs walked on Earth. So the post-KT world was not a new situation, but return to normality.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Someone else posted on this above, I agree. I didn't mean all dinosaurs, but the later small models... And it bothers me even to think it... my brain wants to stick feathers (Or a feathery like appearance) on them. It may just be conditioning.

I remember when I first saw Archaeopteryx. The feathered image just made sense, somehow.

But yeah- I can't see a stegosaurus feathered.


Jurassic Park, I recall that one claymation animator had made the "Velociraptors" flick their tongues out like a snake does. Fortunately, a science adviser saw that and told them "NO!" and it didn't make it into the movie.
But there was a disclaimer on the DVD version saying that the Velociraptors depicted were very much larger than any actual fossils found. This was around the time that UtahRaptor had been discovered, which was quite a bit larger than velociraptor but smaller than Deinonychus (Which is one of my favorites).

They haven't redrawn any evolutionary tree. Their results support what has been the mainstream position for decades. The Times journalist is wildly misrepresenting the significance of the result.

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Science is like sex. Sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it.
-- Richard Feynman

All their genes were technically "tweaks", since they were using reconstructed and partially-substituted (to fill in the gaps) DNA.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Oh, yeah. I done forgot that.