ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, October 18, 1996 TAG: 9610180065
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
SOURCE: NEW YORK
THE DISCOVERY OF PREHISTORIC remains gives paleontologists strong evidence that birds are truly descendants of the ancient beasts.
Chinese paleontologists have found the remains of a 121-million-year-old feathered dinosaur, providing what could be the most graphic evidence yet that birds are descended from the prehistoric titans.
Photographs of the fossilized creature show an unmistakable downy stripe running down its back. If the feathered dinosaur is confirmed, say paleontologists who have seen the fossil, then it provides almost irrefutable evidence that today's birds evolved from dinosaurs.
``As soon as they showed me the specimen, it just blew me away,'' said Phil Currie, a paleontologist who recently saw the fossil in Beijing. ``You can't come to any conclusion other than that they're feathers.''
The feathered fossil provides further ammunition for the already widely accepted theory that dinosaurs gave rise to birds, a theory now based mostly on the similarity in shape of hip bones.
``This is not a bird, but it does have feathers,'' said Luis Chiappe of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. ``So the people who resist the dinosaur origin of birds will have a hard time explaining this.''
On Thursday, Chen Pei-Ji of the Nanjing Paleontology Institute showed photographs of the fossil at the American Museum of Natural History, where the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology is holding its annual meeting. The photographs show the flattened remains of a bird-like beast splayed out on a slab of rock.
Arrayed down the dinosaur's back, from the nape of its neck to the tip of its tail, is what appears to be a row of feathers that have left their impression in the rock.
``It's fantastic,'' said Currie, who is a paleontologist at the Royal Tyrell Museum in Canada. ``It's almost mane-like at the back of the head.''
In life, Currie said, the feathered dinosaur was about 3 feet long. It ran on its hind legs, holding its front limbs in front of it in the manner of the vicious velociraptors from the film ``Jurassic Park.''
The dinosaur wasn't a velociraptor, however. Currie judged from its appearance that the feathered dinosaur is closely related to compsognathus, a small dinosaur that ate insects and other small animals.
A fossil collector discovered the feathered dinosaur in Liaoning province. Paleontologists have become quite familiar with the rocks there, because in the last few years they have yielded spectacular fossils of ancient birds, most of which have had dinosaur-like characteristics.
There are only two reasons for any animal to have feathers, Chiappe said: to fly - which the feathered dinosaur obviously wasn't doing - or to stay warm.
Because the feathered dinosaur would have used its downy covering to hold in heat, it might be tempting to use the feathered dinosaur as evidence that dinosaurs were warm-blooded. But of all the dinosaurs, Chiappe said, the line that led to birds is among the least likely to have been warm-blooded.
He speculates that the feathered dinosaur may have developed feathers because it was on the road to warm-bloodedness, but hadn't got far.
In order to demonstrate conclusively that the impressions represent feathers, rather than feather-like scales or hair-like structures, the Chinese researchers will have to examine the fossil further.
LENGTH: Medium: 65 linesby CNB