Some dinosaurs were utterly bizarre. You may have heard of them before, but one particular group called therizinosaurs belonged to the meat-eating theropod dinosaurs (those that led to birds), were really awesome. However, they actually at some point made a conscious evolutionary decision to stop being badasses, and become Cretaceous-cauliflower* munching pansies.
The greatest story ever told, by fossils
A lot of recent(ish) posts featured on this blog have been about the evolution of flight and feathered dinosaurs. I promised to kick this habit, and write about something different, but this video by Carl Zimmer adds a really nice narrative to the story and is quite a nice little overview for anyone interested.
If you have any questions about bird-like fossils, feathers, their function, or dino-birds in general, pop them in the comments and I’ll see what I can do! Stay tuned for the latest in the #OpenPhD series, and more cool palaeo stuff. 🙂
Fossil feathers are frickin’ sweet
The origin and evolution of dinosaur feathers, and their colour and function, has been high up on the pecking order for palaeontologists of late. The adaptive poetry that unfolds from fossil finds allows us to bear witness to one of the most beautiful transformations in the history of life on Earth, and the attention to this story is rightly deserved. I’ve devoted quite a bit of this blog to writing about the whole dinosaur to bird transition before, in terms of flight mechanics, flight styles, evolution of flappable wings, feather distributions, sexing dino-birds, and whether new finds are actually worth raving about.
Microraptor gui is an infamous example of a feathered dinosaur (source)
Om nom nom
What comes to mind when you think of dinosaur interaction? Large carnivores chomping on unsuspecting little ornithopods? Ceratopsians jousting for their next mate? Large hadrosaurs tenderly mothering their cute newborns? There are many possible images of community-level dinosaur interactions, and there is a host of evidence out there that take dinosaurs beyond the bones and breathe new life into how they lived.
Phwoar (click for source)