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Fossil Strengthens Dinosaur-Bird Link Feb. 14 — A 130 million-year-old newly discovered fossil of a small meat-eating dinosaur found in China is further proof of the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds, scientists say. "This animal is not a direct ancestor to birds but it is a very close cousin. It is from a group called troodontids which is closely related to birds," Peter Makovicky of the Field Museum in Chicago said on Wednesday. The new dinosaur, called Sinovenator changii, was probably feathered and is almost the same age as the oldest known bird Archaeopteryx. "The similarities in the skeleton ...

A Caudipteryx zoui fossil cast. (Daderot/Wikimedia Commons/CC0 1.0) The remnants of DNA may lurk in 125 million-year-old dinosaur fossils found in China. If the microscopic structures are indeed DNA, they would be the oldest recorded preservation of chromosome material in a vertebrate fossil. DNA is coiled inside chromosomes within a cell's nucleus. Researchers have reported possible cell nucleus structures in fossils of plants and algae dating back millions of years. Scientists have even suggested that a set of microfossils from 540 million years ago might hold preserved nuclei. These claims are often controversial, because it can be hard to distinguish...

Reconstruction of the Jehol Biota and the well-preserved specimen of Caudipteryx.A team of scientists from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and from the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature (STM) has isolated exquisitely preserved cartilage cells in a 125-million-year-old dinosaur from Northeast China that contain nuclei with remnants of organic molecules and chromatin. The study was published in Communications Biology on Sept. 24.The dinosaur, called Caudipteryx, was a small peacock-sized omnivore with long tail feathers. It roamed the shores of the shallow lakes of the Jehol Biota in Liaoning province during...

Papers have been flapping with new headlines about the latest in a long line of alleged dinosaur ancestors of birds. This one is claimed to be a sensational dinosaur with feathers on its hind legs, thus four ‘wings’.1 This was named Microraptor gui—the name is derived from words meaning ‘little plunderer of Gu’ after the paleontologist Gu Zhiwei. Like so many of the alleged feathered dinosaurs, it comes from Liaoning province of northeastern China. It was about 3 feet (1 meter) long from its head to the tip of its long tail, but its body was only about the size...