New dinosaur news is always good news:
The record for the oldest feathered dinosaur, which has stood for almost 150 years since the discovery of Archaeopteryx, has finally fallen to an even older fossil unearthed in China, shedding new light on the origin of birds.
. . . the new Chinese find Anchiornis huxleyi, the latest of a number of specimens found in the past year and the first to sport feathers . . . comes from the Tiaojishan formation of Jianchang county, recently dated to between 161 and 151 million years old and therefore older than the 150-million-year-old Archaeopteryx-bearing German rocks.
Anchiornis possesses well-developed feathers on all four limbs, a trait that would have seemed bizarre if the fossil had been discovered a decade ago. But palaeontological finds in recent years suggest the four-wing pattern may have been the rule rather than the exception in proto-birds
I’m trying to imagine a four-winged bird, and it’s not coming.
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