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The remains of a 30-foot-long predatory dinosaur discovered along the banks of Argentina's Rio Colorado is helping to unravel how birds evolved their unusual breathing system. University of Michigan paleontologist Jeffrey Wilson was part of the team that made the discovery, to be published Sept. 29 in the online journal Public Library of Science ONE and announced at a news conference in Mendoza, Argentina. The discovery of this dinosaur builds on decades of paleontological research indicating that birds evolved from dinosaurs. Birds have a breathing system that is unique among land animals. Instead of lungs that expand, birds have a...

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...

Ancestors of the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex were clothed in delicate feathers, a fossil discovered in China suggests. The find may come as a surprise to people used to images of Tyrannosaurus as a scaly monster. But many palaeontologists have been predicting just such a find ever since the first evidence of a dinosaur with a feathery coat came from the same site in Liaoning in 1995. The 130 million-year-old fossil is the oldest member recorded from the tyrannosauroid family, and the first in the group with a feather-like covering. The discovery of its skull and other fragments is reported today...