When you picture a dinosaur, what does it look like? For Jingmai O'Connor, paleobiologist and associate curator of reptiles at the Field Museum of Chicago, the dinosaurs she studies look a lot more like birds."If you looked at an artist's reconstruction of something like Velociraptor or Microraptor ... you would see that it pretty much looks the same as a bird," Jingmai says. "In terms of the plumage, the soft tissues covering the body, it would have looked very, very birdlike."In this episode, Short Wave delves into the dinosaur-avian connection. Which dinosaurs had feathers? Were they using them to fly? And once and for all – what are those ancient dinosaurs' relationship to birds today? Have other dinosaur questions you want us to unravel? Email us at [email protected] — we'd love to hear from you!Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey short wavers, Regina Barber here. I'm going to start today's episode with a question. When I say dinosaur, what do you picture in your head? Maybe a stegosaurus, like a chunky guy with diamond-shaped plates and a ridge along its back. Or a triceratops with like huge horns, kind of like a rhinoceros, but like a little kid had drawn it.
Or a T-Rex, classic, big body, big teeth, tiny little arms. But what you might not think of are feathers. It turns out many dinosaurs did have feathers. We found that out in the mid-90s when dinosaur fossils were discovered at the bottom of a lake in China.
In lakes, you have no scavengers and you have guaranteed burial. And so this leads to really exceptional preservation. And these fossils from China, the most common soft tissue they preserve are feathers.
This is Jingmei O'Connor. She's a dinosaur paleobiologist and the associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum of Chicago. And she says that the structure of a feather is mostly keratin, which is a protein that usually breaks down over time.
But when feathers have pigment inside them, they have these pigment-bearing mono-organelles called melanosomes. They're in our eyes, they're in the ink sacs of squid, they're everywhere, right? So these organelles are extremely decay-resistant. So the keratin matrix of the feather is gone, but these pigment-containing mono-organelles get fossilized very easily.
And that's why we can now tell you, sort of, what color some feathered dinosaurs were by looking at these melanosomes.
For the longest time, I admit, I thought the people at the museums or in the movies were like, taking some creative license. Like, how would they know that all of these dinosaurs had those specific colors, that stripe pattern, these feathers? Because the thing that always threw me off was that some dinosaur displays in the museums had feathers and others didn't have any. Like, what gives?
But of course, they were as accurate as possible. The colors, the patterns, and even which dinosaurs had feathers. Because spoiler alert, not all of them did. So today on the show, the gorgeous, vivid world of dinosaur feathers. Which dinosaurs had feathers? Were they using them to fly? And once and for all, what are ancient dinosaurs' relationship to birds today?
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