Sinosauropteryx findings announced

Jeff Poling

A press conference at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Science Thursday, April 24, 1997, announced the findings of an international group of paleontologists sent to China to study the fossil of a possibly feathered non-avian dinosaur.

The group included:

• John Ostrom of Yale University, one of the first modern paleontologists to start paleontology down the road to its current view of dinosaurs. Ostrom also discovered the dinosaur Deinonychus, and announced to a shocked world that its hand was an almost exact scaled-up version of that of the oldest bird known, Archaeopteryx.

• Larry Martin of the University of Kansas, one of the world's foremost authority on early birds. He does not agree with Ostrom and the majority of dinosaur and ornithology paleontologists that birds are dinosaurs. Martin believes instead that birds evolved from a common ancestor with dinosaurs outside of the Dinosauria proper.

• Peter Wellnhofer of the Bavarian State Museum in Munich, an expert on some famous fossils of Archaeopteryx and pterosaurs from Solnhofen, Bavaria. These fossils are preserved with the kind of exquisite detail shown by the fossils of Liaoning Province where Sinosauropteryx prima and many other important fossils were found.

• Alan Brush of the University of Connecticut, an expert on feathers.

The fossil was found in August by Li Yumin, a farmer and fossil hunter living in northeast China. He had been prospecting the deposits of Liaoning Province for many years, but had never found a fossil like this. The fossil was split into two pieces, a slab and counterslab, with bones and impressions on both.

Li sold one piece to the National Geological Museum in Beijing, and the other to the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology.

Beijing museum director Ji Qiang immediately recognized the fossil's significance. A colleague took a photo of it to the annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontologists meeting in New York in October. The photograph apparently sent John Ostrom into a "state of shock," as Ostrom said later, because "it seemed to have feathers." This would strengthen the theory Ostrom pioneered in the 20th century, that birds evolved from dinosaurs.

Although skeptical from the first, Martin acknowledged that "The dinosaur origin of birds is an intrinsically attractive idea. Because if birds are simply dinosaurs, then we have living dinosaurs, and we know all about their internal organs and their physiology and their behavior. We have brought them to life."

The day after the team arrived in Beijing, Ji gathered them at the museum. He brought out a padded, silk-covered box a little larger than a board game. Nestled inside was Sinosauropteryx prima, a fossil 22 inches long, with most of the length tail. To Ostrom, it looked like a small Compsognathus, a quick, small dinosaur known from the same Solnhofen deposits as Archaeopteryx. Along its back and tail was a ridge of darker material, the feather-like forms that had caused such excitement.

After three days of examination (not nearly enough, they stressed), none of them would go out on a limb with a full-fledged judgment. However, they did agree on one thing: under a microscope, that dark-colored ridge doesn't really look like modern feathers. "We cannot call them bird feathers," said Wellnhofer. "It's definitely something quite new and unusual. Whether it has anything to do with bird feathers, I don't know."

Alan Brush states that much more research is necessary. Modern feathers are structures that have been subjected to over a hundred million years of evolution for the purpose of a flight. Brush believes that the structures on the fossil could be protofeathers, the structures from which modern avian feathers evolved, or might be true feathers of a sort entirely unlike modern feathers. More research, including cross-section and chemical analysis, could determine whether they are protofeathers, feathers, or something totally unrelated.

1. Brush, Alan. Sinosauropteryx. Public e-mail to the Dinosaur Mailing List, 15 April 1997.
2. Brush, Alan. Re: Sinosauropteryx. Private e-mail to the author, 17 April 1997.
3. Stieg, Bill. 1997. Debate rages over birds' relation to dinosaurs. Knight-Ridder Newspapers, 23 April.