Fun Fact of the Day 6/11

Well, because I had a Jurassic Park party last night, I'm really rather itching to share a fun fact about dinosaurs in some capacity. So, I've puzzled over just what exactly to write here, and then I settled on the idea of enlightening people to a fact which few people know about some dinosaurs. Now, it's commonly known, at least to a degree, that dinosaurs and birds share an evolutionary link. It's been the scientific consensus for a number of years now, and one can see the implications it's made in films like "Jurassic Park", in which the "Velociraptors" (actually deinonychus, see this fun fact for details) were fast, predatory pack hunters, moving more like killer ostriches than bipedal lizards. But in recent years since the film came out, another remarkable (if more superficial in an evolutionary context) bird-like feature of dinosaurs has become apparent: feathers. Now, before we discuss this feature in full, it is best to first explain it's restrictions within dinosaur classification. Feathers occur in many groups of dinosaurs, particularly on the smaller winged ones (duh) like Archeopteryx. But the group of dinosaurs that is believed to all have feathers is the group known as the Dromaeosaurids, or--if you prefer--the "raptors". This group includes Velociraptor and all of it's counterparts, such as Deinonychus and Dromaeosaurus. The first evidence that Dromaeosaurids had feathers was discovered in 1999, when impressions of feathers were found in the rock surrounding a well-preserved Sinorthosaurus fossil in China. Since then, similar evidence has been found for other members of the family, such as velociraptor, described fully in this paper. So, the scaly monsters that invade the kitchen in Jurassic Park can, since the turn of the century at least, be seen as looking more like killer birds. Personally, I think they look even more awesome that way =)