"Virtually all articulated specimens of Archaeopteryx are in this posture, exhibiting a classic pose of head thrown back, jaws open, back and tail reflexed backward and limbs contracted," said Kevin Padian, professor of integrative biology and curator in the Museum of Paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley. He and Cynthia Marshall Faux of the Museum of the Rockies published their findings in the March issue of the quarterly journal Paleobiology, which appeared this week.

Soft tissue taken from 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex fossil yields original protein
Ancient proteins have been found in bones like those of a 68-million-year-old dinosaur T. rex fossil. Credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation.

A North Carolina State University researcher and her colleagues at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center found out when they confirmed the existence of protein in soft tissue recovered from the bone of a 68 million-year-old T. rex. Their results may both change the way that people think about fossil preservation and present a new method for studying diseases such as cancer.

Dinosaurs on display in Miami

The fossils of feathered dinosaurs whose discoveries helped firm hypotheses on the origin of birds will be exhibited publicly in the U.S. for the first time this weekend.

The roughly 120-million-year-old remains being displayed at the Miami Science Museum starting Saturday were all found in northeastern China beginning in 1998 and helped quiet though not totally muffle decades-old debates on the link between dinosaurs and birds. Most have never been seen outside China.

"For 150 years, people argued over the origin of birds," said Matt Lamanna, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh and an adviser to the "Dinosaurs of China" exhibit. "This debate was still raging in the middle of the 1990s and then somebody went to China and found these fossils."
Wed Jun 13, 2007

Massive, birdlike dinosaur found in Chinese fossil bed

China has uncovered the skeletal remains of a gigantic, surprisingly bird-like dinosaur, which has been classed as a new species.

Eight metres long and standing at twice the height of a man at the shoulder, the fossil of the feathered but flightless Gigantoraptor erlianensis was found in the Erlian basin in Inner Mongolia, researchers wrote in the latest issue of Nature.

A skeletal reconstruction shows preserved elements of Gigantoraptor with a man of average height for scale. Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology & Paleoanthropology, Beijing drawing by Li Rongshan.

The researchers said the dinosaur, discovered in April 2005, weighed about 1.4 tonnes and lived some 85 million years ago.

According to lines of arrested growth detected on its bones, it died as a young adult in its 11th year of life. What was particularly surprising was its sheer size and weight because most theories point to carnivorous dinosaurs getting smaller as they got more bird-like.

"It had no teeth and had a beak. Its forelimbs were very long and we believe it had feathers," Xu Xing at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology & Paleonanthropology said.

This artist's depiction of Gigantoraptor was released in Beijing during a news conference announcing the discovery of the fossil. Photo courtesy of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology & Paleoanthropology, Beijing.

Through analysing its skeleton, the researchers believe the Gigantoraptor shared the same ancestor and belonged to the same family as the Oviraptor. With a beak and feathers, the Oviraptor is also bird-like and flightless, but weighed a mere 1 to 2 kg, Xu said.

Other similar feathered dinosaurs rarely weighed over 40 kg, which means the Gigantoraptor was about 35 times heavier.

The largest known feathered animal before the Chinese discovery was the half-tonne Stirton’s Thunder Bird, which lived in Australia more than six million years ago.

"It’s a giant dinosaur that looked very much like a bird ... whereas from what we have known before, bird-like dinosaurs were very, very small. Large dinosaurs are usually not bird-like. So this Gigantoraptor was an exception," Xu said.