Topic: SCIENCE - on June 30, 2016 at 11:18:00 AM CEST
Rare Dinosaur-Era Bird Wings Found Trapped in Amber
Bone, tissue, and feathers show the almost 100-million-year-old wings are remarkably similar to those on modern birds.
Two tiny wings entombed in amber reveal that plumage (the layering, patterning, coloring, and arrangement of feathers) seen in birds today already existed in at least some of their predecessors nearly a hundred million years ago.
A study of the mummified wings, published in the June 28 issue of Nature Communications and funded in part by the National Geographic Society's Expeditions Council, indicated they most likely belonged to enantiornithes , a group of avian dinosaurs that became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period. (Read more about the evolution from dinosaurs to modern birds.)
... Comment
