First dinosaur tail found, preserved in amber
Paleontologists have discovered the first completely preserved dinosaur tail, feathers and all, preserved in amber.
Inside the lump of resin is a 1.4-inch appendage covered in delicate feathers, described as chestnut brown with a pale or white underside. CT scans and microscopic analysis of the sample revealed eight vertebrae from the middle or end of a long, thin tail that may have been originally made up of more than 25 vertebrae. Based on the structure of the tail, researchers believe it belongs to a juvenile coelurosaur, part of a group of theropod dinosaurs that includes everything from tyrannosaurs to modern birds.
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Paleontologists have discovered the first completely preserved dinosaur tail, feathers and all, preserved in amber.
Inside the lump of resin is a 1.4-inch appendage covered in delicate feathers, described as chestnut brown with a pale or white underside. CT scans and microscopic analysis of the sample revealed eight vertebrae from the middle or end of a long, thin tail that may have been originally made up of more than 25 vertebrae. Based on the structure of the tail, researchers believe it belongs to a juvenile coelurosaur, part of a group of theropod dinosaurs that includes everything from tyrannosaurs to modern birds.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
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3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
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Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
Feathers…..it’s amazing! Birds really are the vestiges of dinosaurs in many ways. It figures. The way I see it, when the small mammals appeared, they were able to eat the eggs of most of the large dinos. The only way to adapt was to make those feathers fly and build their nests in trees away from those ground dwelling mammals. Who knows if it’s true, but I like the idea.
Jwing, cute idea! Since so little is known for sure, it is wide open for speculations and new hypotheses. Sounds feasible and there’s nothing to falsify it, so it could be true.
Spinning further on the feathered dinosaurs and speculative hypotheses, it has been suggested that birds learned humans how to talk. Language is really The thing which separates us from the animals, it allows for specialization and economy and teaching. So the idea is that birds make a lot of noise, other animals are generally silent to avoid attention from predators or scaring their pray (birds in the sky are easily visible anyway and can’t hide by shutting up, so why not sing and shout). To coordinate hunting, groups of apes shout to each other (“nothing here”, “tracks here heading north”). By imitating birds, they could camouflage their presence for their pray. Such spoken signals then evolved into words and grammar. Our language, with which even computer programming has fused, could basically be bird imitation.
Language must’ve evolved together with the tongue and the vocal cord. The history of human society needs to go a million years back, into evolutionary time scales, to cover the whole story of how animals became humans. The depth of time and richness of events probably makes it impossible to understand what has happened using any single theory.