In the 1990s, a Chinese farmer and hobby fossil collector found a dinosaur fossil that fundamentally changed our image of prehistoric giants.
Liaoning dinosaurs apparently also had plumage. A discovery (* FR reported) from China has fundamentally changed our image of dinosaurs. And it is precisely a farmer and hobby collector who made this historic find.
In 1996, Li Yumin found a rock slab in the Yixian Formation. He knew instinctively that it had to be something extraordinary. Yumin split the plate and struck two halves of a fossil about two feet long.
Dinosaurs with feathers: important function for conspecifics
The hobby collector offered half of the fossil to the National Geological Museum in Beijing and the other half to the Institute of Geology and Paleontology in Nanjing. The Beijing Museum took up the matter and carried out an analysis of the dinosaur fossil. Among other things, the rock showed that the animal was surrounded by a thin shell or layer. Just like bird down. The scientists suspected that the dinosaur must have had primitive feathers. The fossil was named Sinosauropteryx. According to Spektrum.de , the dinosaur was between 70 and 100 centimeters tall.
It is the first dinosaur to exhibit features that are otherwise only found in birds. With this spectacular find it became clear that the image of the terrifying dinosaur that had prevailed up to now was changing. Scientists can also draw important conclusions about the relationship between dinosaurs and birds.
Canadian scientist: “I almost fell over”
The Canadian paleontologist Phil Currie, who was visiting the Chinese Museum at the time, was enthusiastic: “When I saw this slab of siltstone mixed with volcanic ash and the creature embedded in it, I almost fell over,” as scinexx.de reports.
For years the researchers wondered why dinosaurs were also equipped with feathers. In 2010 they discovered that some of the animals had different colors of feathers. The scientists concluded from this that the feathers offered the dinosaurs social functions: the assignment to a species, a gender and health information were possible for conspecifics on the basis of the plumage. * FR is an offer from IPPEN.Media.
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