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Athletic and handsome, Matthew Lamanna looks more like an actor than a prestigious paleontologist, but he is the premier dinosaur expert at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, which houses one of the most important collections in the world. In recent years he has conducted excavations in Patagonia, Egypt, Australia and China, where he has unearthed several new species of dinosaurs and other vertebrates. He is also the scientific advisor to a fantastic exhibit currently on the bill at the Miami Science Museum on the dinosaurs of China. The oldest specimens in the sample – 200 million years old – come from Yunnan province and are among the oldest in the world. There are also excellent fossils from Shandong and Sichuan – 160 million years old – but the jewels on display are the feathered dinosaurs from Liaoning Province – the link with birds – unique to that part of China. “A whole scientific revolution,” says Lamanna, who discussed her discoveries with Angela Posada-Swafford.
-Can it be said that the feathered ones of Liaoning are the Archeopteryx of China?
-No, those were feathered dinosaurs, evolutionarily prior to theArchaeopteryx, which was already a bird. Chinese feathers are older and evolutionarily less related to modern birds than theArchaeopteryx.
-Which were the first feathers in evolution?
-The oldest is theSinosauropteryx, but of those that we have in this exhibition the “grandfather” is theCaudipteryx -between 140 and 124 million years old-, whose name refers to its feathered tail. It is the first known dinosaur with feathers identical to those of modern birds. Very little is known about this animal that was of great importance in the later evolution of birds. Its anatomy is unique: long legs, short tail topped by a fan of feathers, small head … More than a dinosaur it looks like a flightless bird, and its short arms point to stunted wings.
-The color and shape of the plumage are reminiscent of those of guinea fowl or African guinea fowl …
-It’s true. From an ecological point of view, theCaudipteryx it must have led a life similar to that of a turkey or a hen, in any case as a land bird that did not fly. The question of color is also interesting because this is the only dinosaur whose tail feathers we know of, with black and white stripes.
-What is the next fossil in the evolutionary order?
-Its aboutSinornithosaurus, which has teeth in its beak. It lived about 125 million years ago. It may sound familiar to you. Doesn’t it remind you of someone?
-A Velociraptor?
“That’s just what I expected you to answer!” ASinornithosaurus It is a feathered dromaeosaur, and Velociraptors are dromaeosaurs too. The reason why in the first installment of Jurassic Park theVelociraptor appear with scales and in the third part they already had feathers is that in 1999, between the filming of one and the other, the firstSinornithosaurusfeathered, which turned out to be a dromaeosaur, that is, aVelociraptor with feathers. Today paleontologists think that probably all dromaeosaurs had feathers, including those of Spielberg.
-Where did you get the idea that Velociraptors were very smart?
– (Laughter) Whoa! His brain was the size of a grape and his intelligence comparable to that of a turkey. I guarantee that if a Velociraptor had to open a door it wouldn’t know how. Nor could they run at 90 km per hour, but that is how the film portrayed them and that is how they remained in the collective imagination of the audience.
-What about Confuciusornis sanctus?
-It is a primitive bird that lived at the end of the lower Cretaceous period, about 120 million years ago, and it is interesting for many reasons. It had a toothless beak, like modern birds. However, we think that its beak evolved rather like that of dinosaurs, in parallel with that of birds. The teeth in the beak evolved in several families of dinosaurs and we believe that the Confuciusornis lost its teeth independently of the birds.
-What was the evolutionary advantage of losing teeth?
-I think it had to do with the need to lighten the skeleton to be able to fly.
-Then the Confuciusornis could fly, or almost?
-The Confuciusornis was essentially a flyer with a short beak and tail. From the point of view of its skeleton, this animal was a tank compared to today’s birds. We believe that he was trying to do the same things as birds but without having the necessary anatomical equipment. He was an experimental pioneer in flight, as evidenced by his beak and hollow arm humerus, a unique feature of Confuciusornis, which gives the impression that he was trying to lighten his bones despite being like a block.
-The evolution surprised red-handed …
-Exactly. That can be applied to all of these fossils. TheCaudipteryx had feathers, theSinornitosaurius, feathers and sternum, and the Confuciusornis, feathers, sternum and short tail. In addition, it was the first bird that had a tail made up of vertebrae united in a single structure; this characteristic makes us think that it was more advanced than theArchaeopteryx, whose tail was more reptilian. The birds that came later, calledEnantiornithes, incorporated a new advantage: they were very small and developed the first outlines of a keel sternum, that cartilaginous protrusion that chickens have and that we can see when separating the breasts. If it is this big in a chicken, imagine what it will be like in birds that do fly, as it serves to anchor the muscles of flight.
-And that of spongy bone tissues?
-One of the characteristics that non-avian dinosaurs share with true birds are the bones, the hollow vertebrae of the tail. Many of the large predatory dinosaurs also have gaps and air pockets.
-Microraptor looks like a feathered dragon. Where does it fit?
-TheMicroraptor is another sensational chapter of prehistory, it is known as the dinosaur with four wings. Here on the back of the fossil the feathers are clearly visible as a dark spot. In 2003 someMicroraptor very well preserved that even had feathers on their legs; That is why we believe that they were part of a stage in the evolution of birds in which instead of flying they soared, like squirrels, from tree to tree. There is consensus that the first birds learned to fly by jumping from the top of the branches of trees, and not by taking flight from the ground in a rush. The feathers of theCaudipteryx served as a coat, not for flying, but those of theMicroraptor they were already helping him to stay a little in the air. In other words, theArchaeopteryx flew better than the Microraptor, theConfuciusornisI flew better than himArchaeopteryx and theEnantiornithesI flew better than himConfuciusornis.
-So who was the first successful aviator?
-Probably theEnantiornithesIt was the first really successful experiment, but the best aviator of primitive birds was undoubtedly theGansus, which lived 110 million years ago. The keel of its sternum is very powerful. It is the most similar bird to the current ones.
– It was you who described it for the first time, after a colleague of yours discovered it in Gansu province, China. In this photo they appear the two …
-Yes. Here we are very happy because two minutes before the Chinese paleontologist Hailu You showed me two small fragments of a fossil of a bird that he had found, one from a wing and the other from a leg. In other words, the species was already known, but no one had seen a whole specimen, so the animal had not been scientifically described. So I went to the Discovery Channel and insisted until they gave me $ 50,000 to dig. Finally, in the summer of 2004, we discovered 110 fossils of birds. One of them was an entire copy of theGansus yumenensis, a small amphibian bird that lived in a lake about 110 million years ago in the Changma Basin of northern China. From there we made a documentary about the resurgence of feathered dragons.
-And what about finding a feathered superdinosaur? Its size does not seem to have much relation to the species that had been found before.
-None of the feathered dinosaurs that we knew so far was more than three meters long, although we thought that there were large feathered dinosaurs that had not been preserved. That was precisely the caseGigantoraptor, described a few months ago. We are sure he had feathers because he belonged to the same group as theCaudipteryx. The conditions that must be met for feathers and other soft tissues to survive in a fossil are so extraordinary that it is almost a miracle that we have collected some samples. Liaoning Province is the only place in the world where these ideal conditions exist. Prehistoric feathered birds have been found elsewhere, but not dinosaurs.
-There are a lot of spectacular feathered dragons here, but you have a predilection for another type of dinosaur …
-Certain. My favorite – and the second most important fossil in this exhibit – is theHuayangosaurus, 170 million years old. Many people think it is a baby, but no: it is the oldest and most primitive stegosaurus that we know of in paleontology, about 20 million years older than the next oldest in North America. He is like his great-great-grandfather, and represents a key phase of the lineage. It has very narrow plates. It is obvious that the plates started out as spines and then widened. That is why we think that their function was not only defensive, but that they used them to thermoregulate, directing them to the sun when they were cold or to the shade when it was hot, like the ears of elephants. Stegosaurs are among the best known dinosaurs but they were not the most successful. In fact, they were one of the few groups that became extinct before the end of the age of dinosaurs.
-Ah, but I know that you harbor a secret love.
– (Laughter) Do you know? Well then it is no longer a secret. Yes it’s correct. My passion is the giant herbivorous dinosaurs of Argentine Patagonia. I will be back in a few months.
– Leaving aside that infidelity, can it be said that China is the main destination of current paleontologists?
-Without a doubt. It is the only place in the world where you can find feathered dinosaurs and where there are fossils of all ages from the age of dinosaurs. It’s like a complete catalog, from the end of the Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous, when they were extinct. So, to investigate and learn more about the evolution of any group of those prehistoric reptiles, China is an inescapable destination. The Huayango saurus opened a window to primitive stegosaurs for us. The sauropods – those herbivores with very long necks – in China are proof of how evolution works in isolation conditions that caused that part of their anatomy to lengthen in a crazy way. The necks of the Mamenchisaurus and Omeisaurus were proportionally much longer in relation to their size than those of any other sauropod in history. It’s crazy. But there is no doubt that the hottest topic in paleontology today is the transition from dinosaurs to birds, and there is no better place to document that transition than China. It is an area that shows that dinosaurs are not really extinct, but are represented in the 10,000 living species of birds.
By Ángela Posada-Swafford
