Knowtex

You should all know that velociraptors weren’t really like they were portrayed in ‘Jurassic Park’. They were an awful lot smaller, they had feathers, and they probably weren’t quite so smart. But they *were* nasty predators. Or were they?

We now have enough fossils of feathered dinosaurs to fill entire museums. These specimens have beautifully recorded the history of feather evolution but Ryan McKellar from the University of Alberta has found another narrator for that tale: amber.

A painstaking search through thousands of chunks of amber has unearthed 11 prehistoric feathers. They promise an unprecedented look at the history of these peculiar structures in both birds and non-avian dinosaurs.

Fluffy structures trapped in thumbnail-sized bits of ancient amber may represent some of the earliest evolutionary experiments leading to feathers, according to a new study. These filaments of "dinofuzz" are so well preserved that they even provide hints of color, the researchers say.

In a small forest clearing in Papua New Guinea, a male six-wired bird of paradise is getting ready for a show-stopping number. He rears up and spreads his wings so that they encircle his body like a ballerina’s skirt. He begins to dance...

The last few weeks have been pretty exciting for people interested in theropod dinosaurs.... but then, you could say this about most weeks: new theropods are constantly being published.

Quasimodo, call your lawyer. Scientists have found the fossilized remains of a carnivorous dinosaur they've nicknamed the Hunchback of Las Hoyas because of a humplike feature on its spine.

A predatory dinosaur with bony bumps on its arms and a strange hump on its back provides evidence that feathers began to appear earlier than researchers thought, according to a report in Nature today.

Early feathers evolved for insulation and display were barely strong enough for gliding, says report in journal Science.

Beating the drinking age would have been quite a challenge during the Cretaceous period. New fossils uncovered in northeastern China show that two specimens of the same species of dinosaur, one juvenile and one adult, featured distinctly different feathers.