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analysis of the sample revealed eight vertebrae from the middle or end of a long, thin tail that may have been originally made up of more than 25 vertebrae.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.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
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analysis of the sample revealed eight vertebrae from the middle or end of a long, thin tail that may have been originally made up of more than 25 vertebrae.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.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
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.