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Dinosaur feathers frozen in time

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


Since it's getting so ugly over at TechCrunch, I thought I should provide an antidote of real beauty. Every now and then a scientific paper is published that hits it out of the park with imagery. Yesterday, McKellar el. al did just that in Science, publishing a smorgasbord of photographs of dinosaur and early bird feathers trapped in amber in addition to a truly stellar reconstruction of Sinosauropteryx by Chuang Zhao and Lida Xing. Without further ado:

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McKellar, R., Chatterton, B., Wolfe, A., & Currie, P. (2011). A Diverse Assemblage of Late Cretaceous Dinosaur and Bird Feathers from Canadian Amber Science, 333 (6049), 1619-1622 DOI: 10.1126/science.1203344