A feather in dinosaur poop, and why birds are still here
I have a soft spot for fossil news, and this one from this week made me stop scrolling.
Researchers led by the University of Washington said they found the best-preserved feathers we have from the age of dinosaurs. The odd part is where the feathers were: inside a lump of fossilized dinosaur poop. Paleontologists call that a coprolite. It was dug up in 2016 in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, and it is about 66 million years old.
The poop came from a big meat eater, maybe a T. rex, maybe a Nanotyrannus. Inside it were feathers, gar fish scales, and bones from a hesperornithiform, which was a diving bird a bit like a loon. So you are basically looking at one dinosaur's dinner.
What the team noticed is that two of the feathers have a square shaft with a spongy center. You see that combination in modern birds and their direct ancestors, and nobody had seen it in any other feather from that time. The bird that got eaten had simpler feathers, the kind that are more about insulation. The idea is that better feathers may have helped some bird ancestors get through the long cold after the asteroid hit, while others didn't make it.
I like that the detail survived at all. A feather is about the most delicate thing I can think of, and this one went through a predator's gut and then 66 million years of rock. Lucky break for anyone who wanted to know how birds pulled through.