dinosaur feathers?

[wyly]

article I was alerted to on CBC website...researchers have identified dinosaur feathers in amber at the Tyrell museum in alberta...it's been suspected that dinosaurs had feathers from fossil specimens in china but because of fossilization process the structure was unknown...but doing a search of amber in it's collection proto-feathers have been found, birds don't have proto-feathers...not only can the structure be determined but the colour as well, this will certainly change the way dinosaurs are depicted in movies, feathery brightly coloured T-rex's and such...

[Moonlight Graham]

They say in the article that they would look more like hairs to human eyes, but are indeed feather structures under microscope. So i don't know about the "bright colours" theory, they could just be brown or grey etc....but who knows. The picture of the "theropod fossil from China" is amazing, the dino just looks like it would be hairy like a mammal or something...but imagine they would look different than either mammal hair or bird feathers.

Anyways, this is all fascinating.

edit: just said on the CBC that the feathers they found were black and brown.

Edited September 16, 2011 by Moonlight Graham

[wyly]

They say in the article that they would look more like hairs to human eyes, but are indeed feather structures under microscope. So i don't know about the "bright colours" theory, they could just be brown or grey etc....but who knows. The picture of the "theropod fossil from China" is amazing, the dino just looks like it would be hairy like a mammal or something...but imagine they would look different than either mammal hair or bird feathers.

Anyways, this is all fascinating.

edit: just said on the CBC that the feathers they found were black and brown.

colours will likely reflect what we see in birds today...we have black and brown birds and a rainbow of colours as well, colour is dependent on need, camouflage or display...interesting program tonight, recreating dinosaurs out of chickens, embryo chickens have tails, teeth and claws on their wings all which disappear before they hatch, researcher said the ingredients are still there and has already succeeded in growing more vertebrae in the tail and says with time they will have a chicken with a tail, teeth and wing/arm claws...a feathered mini T-Rex...

[Sir Bandelot]

colours will likely reflect what we see in birds today...we have black and brown birds and a rainbow of colours as well, colour is dependent on need, camouflage or display...interesting program tonight, recreating dinosaurs out of chickens, embryo chickens have tails, teeth and claws on their wings all which disappear before they hatch, researcher said the ingredients are still there and has already succeeded in growing more vertebrae in the tail and says with time they will have a chicken with a tail, teeth and wing/arm claws...a feathered mini T-Rex...

Yeah like we need that... no more Kurnel Sanders.

[naturally]

In the first chapter of Genesis, verse 21, we read that on Day 5 of creation, God created “every winged fowl after its kind.” This includes birds that flew above the earth (Genesis 1:20). Man and land animals were created on Day 6 of the Creation Week (Genesis 1:24–31). Were there land birds that didn’t fly originally? I would leave open the possibility, but a discussion of this is beyond the scope of this chapter. Most ornithologists say that these birds are secondarily flightless (i.e., they lost the ability to fly). This would be due to variance within kind or to mutational losses since creation. So, the best possibility is that birds were created on Day 5 as flyers, and some have lost this ability, but I wouldn’t be dogmatic.

The extinct aquatic reptiles, such as the plesiosaurs, and the extinct flying reptiles, such as the pterodactyls, are not classified as dinosaurs, and most evolutionists do not believe that they evolved into birds. Thus, for the Bible-believing Christian, both the fact of creation and the order of creation affirm that birds and dinosaurs originated separately.

[August1991]

Thus, for the Bible-believing Christian, both the fact of creation and the order of creation affirm that birds and dinosaurs originated separately.

By insisting on a literal interpretation, you are missing the great beauty of the Bible.

----

There is little doubt that modern birds find their origins in dinosaurs. So, I would not be surprised to learn that dinosaurs had "feathers" just as they had "eyes". Keep in mind though that feathers (and eyes) today have had 60 million more years to evolve and change.

Since feathers are so closely connected to signalling for procreation, I suspect that their evolution has been more radical than other features.