Lots of déjà vu ink: A dino, its melanosomes, and its plumage.
One can imagine that, over in Nature’s offices, some editor has turned to the other and in exasperation exclaimed, “Why couldn’t we have had that paper, too?” That being the paper this week in Science that says the same thing as a paper in Nature did last week (previous post here), only with bells on and much cooler pictures of a feathered almost-bird dinosaur. The two papers, in a well-ordered world, would in fact have run in one journal together or, if the journals knew of one another’s manuscripts in press, have been released to the public at the same time. Hmmm. Orderliness is not everything. It’s on the boring side. Moving right along…
The news is that just one week after on team in Nature reported a sort of bristly bipedal lizardish dinosaur and evidence of pigment-bearing structures in its crude feathers, another group from Yale, China, U of Akron, and elsewhere has in Science a reconstructed, fully-plumed creature that may not have flown but sure looks entirely birdish. It even has what look a lot like flight feathers on what look like wings. Most important, the whole thing’s color scheme has been inferred with what appears to be high confidence.
Personally, I think we’ve finally found an early iteration of the recently-probably-extinct ivory-billed woodpecker shown at the right that caused such a fuss when a possible video and audio of one in a southern swamp surfaced a few years ago. But never mind…
AP‘s Randolph E. Schmid gives just the news in his lede, and then sidles into mention of last week’s report.
At Science News Sid Perkins uses as his lede what a lot of us probably thought on hearing about this: Another week another colorful feathered dinosaur. He say it is peacock sized, but AP says it weighed maybe four ounces. I don’t know who’s right on that (both?). Most useful, Perkins finds a source who confidently tells us that the arm feathers were not wing feathers, even though I’m looking right at that picture and thinking that this pretty thing flew. The feathers are not, says here, big enough to carry the creature’s weight. Ergo, such adornments set the stage for flight but evolved for other reasons. That has biologists fascinated.
Writing this story one week after another so similar, if not as emphatic, has to have had more than one editor ask the reporter, “What, again?”
Other stories:
- NYTimes – Carl Zimmer: Evidence Builds on Color of Dinosaurs ; Excellent initial quote: “This is actual science, not ‘Avatar’ ; He calls it chicken-sized.
- Telegraph (UK) Richard Alleyne: Dinosaurs had mohawks and freckles ;
- National Geographic – Chris Sloan: True-Color Dinosaur Revealed: First Full-Body Rendering ; Check it out – one cool looping video of the reconstruction. No wonder Nat’l Geo has it – it helped pay for the research.
- Voice of America – Jessica Berman: Dinosaur with Colorful Plumage Discovered ;
- Times (UK) Hannah Devlin: Dinosaur was like a chicken, with extra wings ; She calls all four limbs wings. She does not report any evidence it flew. Are they wings, then? That’s an imponderable. Ostriches have wings and don’t fly. Penguins don’t fly and the word for their front limbs is flippers. What ARE these appendages?
- Scientific American – Katherine Harmon: Prehistoric patterns: A dinosaur gets color from head to feathery tail.
- Cleveland Plain Dealer – John Mangels: The colors of a feathered dinosaur emerge as University of Akron researcher and colleagues analyze fossil ; Long and careful piece. It is further illustration of what is lost as regional, mainstream news outlets reduce staffs including science specialists. On such big news, national stories, AP, NYTimes and the like do cover it – but seldom have the local detail that can bring it alive to readers.
- New Haven Register – Ed Stannard: Dinosaur shows its true colors at Yale. A distinctively different, but competent story, with a highlight on the wildlife painter who rendered the animal. Stannard is id’d as the metro editor. He handled but, as per the preceding bullet, too bad if there is no experienced science writer on staff – in a town with such a big research university – to cover such news regularly. It does not mention last week’s similar news. It is not clear why this story names a Yale co-author as leader of the team when another Yale prof is listed on the paper as the man to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Grist for the Mill: Yale Press Release ;
- Charlie Petit
