Feathered Dinosaurs and Fractured Supercontinents

▪ 1999

       Dinosaur paleontologists would remember 1998 as a year filled with excitement, contention, and new insight spurred by a number of astonishing discoveries. The most publicized of the new finds related to the decades-old debate over the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds—specifically whether birds arose from small, light-boned theropod dinosaurs. (The bipedal theropods include nearly all the carnivorous dinosaurs, from species as small as chickens to the huge Tyrannosaurus.) In June scientists reported that fossils of two new theropods from the Early Cretaceous of northeastern China, Protarchaeopteryx robusta and Caudipteryx zoui, had unmistakable feathers spreading out from the forearms and tails. (The Cretaceous Period lasted from 144 million to 66.4 million years ago.) The features described as feathers on these turkey-sized dinosaurs, which lived about 120 million years ago, were better preserved than the structures reported two years earlier as having been identified on the back of another Chinese theropod, Sinosauropteryx.

      Although many paleontologists believed that the new discoveries clinched the case for the link between dinosaurs and birds, some continued to disagree about whether the structures represented true feathers, protofeathers, or something else. Others argued that the newfound fossil animals were not dinosaurs but primitive, flightless birds. If the evolution of feathers preceded the evolution of birds and bird flight, then feathers must have first served a different function. Some experts speculated that if feathers evolved for a purpose such as insulation, display, or camouflage, a downy coat or feathery patches on dinosaurs could have been fairly common, despite the meagre preservation of feathers in the fossil record.

      Also reported during the year was the first known furcula—fused clavicles, also called the wishbone in birds—from a theropod in the tyrannosaurid family. Critics of the dinosaur-bird theory had long maintained that theropods could not have been the ancestors of birds because they lacked a furcula, and until recently the structure had been found in only a few dinosaurs. As of 1998, however, the furcula had been discovered in representatives of a number of theropod families, including the allosaurids, oviraptorids, and troodontids, in addition to the tyrannosaurids.

      The very first dinosaur reported from Italy, Scipionyx samniticus, represented one of the best-preserved dinosaur specimens known. This exquisite specimen, of a small juvenile theropod, included impressions of preserved soft parts such as muscles and internal organs. Despite the preserved detail, however, the fossil showed no evidence of feathers.

      Not only were new dinosaur discoveries shedding light on bird evolution, they were also providing insight into the way the Earth's ancient landmasses broke up to form the present-day continents and how these changes, in turn, affected dinosaur evolution and their distribution around the world. In May researchers described an especially well-preserved skull belonging to an unusual carnivorous dinosaur, Majungatholus atopus, from the Late Cretaceous of Madagascar. They assigned the new find to the theropod family Abelisauridae and judged it to be most similar to abelisaurs from South America. Typical theories of the Cretaceous breakup of the southern supercontinent Gondwana have Madagascar and the Indian subcontinent separating as one mass from Antarctica about 125 million years ago and South America separating from Africa before 100 million years ago, with Madagascar and India going their separate ways by 85 million years ago. However, because abelisaurs were known from South America, India, and now Madagascar but not from Africa, the findings suggested that Madagascar had land links with South America through India and Antarctica well into the Cretaceous, after it had severed any links to the African continent. This was consistent with a revised theory of Gondwanan breakup, in which Africa became completely isolated in the Early Cretaceous, whereas connections between the other southern landmasses were maintained until much later.

      During the year researchers published an extensive work on the evolution and phylogeny of the sauropods, a group of large-to-gigantic quadrupedal herbivorous dinosaurs that includes Brachiosaurus and Apatosaurus (Brontosaurus). In addition to offering a detailed revision of the taxonomy of the sauropods, the study concluded that all of the major groups of sauropods had evolved before the Late Jurassic (163 million to 144 million years ago), prior to the separation of the supercontinent of Pangaea into the major landmass groups of Gondwana and Laurasia. Sauropods thus spread to all of the major continental regions before the Cretaceous, during which they suffered extinction in some areas and diversified in others.

      The bevy of the year's important dinosaur discoveries extended even to the unborn. In November researchers reported finding numerous preserved sauropod embryos within a nesting ground comprising fragments of thousands of fossil eggs from the Late Cretaceous of Argentina. The remains represented the first identified embryos of sauropods and the first dinosaur embryos from a Gondwanan landmass. In addition to embryo bone, the specimens included large patches of fossilized skin casts, the first ever reported for dinosaur embryos. The detailed scale patterns preserved in the skin resembled those of modern-day reptiles. That the embryos were unequivocally sauropods discredited a controversial idea proposed by some paleontologists that this group of dinosaurs had been live bearers rather than egg layers.

WILLIAM R. HAMMER

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