![]() After all, if birds derived from dinosaurs-which by now many paleontologists were beginning to accept-feathers must have developed somewhere along that evolutionary lineage. Maybe, Ostrom surmised, Deinonychus even had feathers. It had long arms that looked almost like wings and a lithe build indicative of an active, energetic animal. In the mid-1960s Yale University paleontologist John Ostrom unearthed the astonishingly birdlike dinosaur Deinonychus in western North America. The question was ultimately settled, as these things usually are, by the discovery of new fossils. Others disagreed, and the debate went back and forth for the next 100 years. So he proposed a radical idea: birds descended from dinosaurs. Huxley realized that the beast, dubbed “Archaeopteryx,” bore an uncanny resemblance to small flesh-eating dinosaurs such as Compsognathus that were also starting to come to light at around the same time. It had sharp claws and a long tail like a reptile but feathers and wings like a bird. Just a few years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, quarry workers in Bavaria split open a limestone slab with the 150-million-year-old skeleton of a Frankenstein creature inside. In the 1860s English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley-one of Darwin's closest friends and most vociferous supporters-began to figure out the mystery of where birds came from. Birds are so distinctive, in fact, that researchers have long puzzled over their origins. In addition to traits that enable them to fly, they possess high metabolisms that allow them to grow incredibly quickly and large brains that endow them with high intelligence and keen senses. Transitional Fossilsīirds have a host of features that set them apart from all other modern animals. Does it happen rapidly, the accident of some freak mutation that can turn a land-bound creature into a master of the skies? Or are these new groups forged more slowly, as organisms adapt to changing environments over millions of years? Zhenyuanlong and the other fossils from Liaoning and elsewhere are starting to provide an answer. Ever since Charles Darwin, scientists have wondered how evolution produces radically new groups of animals. The implications of these fossils are momentous. It is the latest of many feathered dinosaurs found in China's Liaoning Province over the past two decades-a remarkable series of fossils that illustrate, like a flip book, how the monstrous dinosaurs of yore transformed into the birds of today. This dinosaur bore a striking resemblance to a bird.Ībout a year later Lü and I described this skeleton as a new species, which we called Zhenyuanlong. Its bones were light and hollow, its legs long and skinny like a heron's, and its body covered with assorted types of feathers, including big quill pens on the arms, stacked over one another to form wings. Yet the Chinese specimen differed from such ordinary dinosaurs in important ways. It was then that I found myself face-to-face with one of the most beautiful fossils I had ever seen: a skeleton about the size of a donkey, its chocolate-brown bones contrasting with the surrounding gray limestone.Ĭlearly a dinosaur, the creature had steak knife teeth, pointy claws and a long tail that left no doubt that it was a close cousin of Jurassic Park's villainous Velociraptor. With the seriousness of a high-level political summit, our party proceeded down a long hallway and into a side room where a slab of rock perched on a small table. A small band of local dignitaries greeted us and whisked us away to the city's museum, a rickety building on the outskirts of town. Something rumored to be incredible was waiting for me at my destination-a mysterious fossil that a farmer had stumbled on while harvesting his crops.įour hours later I stepped onto the platform in Jinzhou, trailing behind my colleague Junchang Lü, a famous dinosaur hunter at the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences in Beijing who had asked for my help in studying the fossil. I tried to steal back some sleep as we crawled past concrete factories and hazy cornfields, but I was too excited to nod off. I was headed for Jinzhou, a Chicago-sized city in the northeastern fringes of China. At about six o'clock in the morning, long before light broke on a cold November day in 2014, I pushed through the Beijing station and fought my way onto a crowded train.
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