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Big fluffy bird from hell?

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So they say, 125 mya.

Velociraptor, from the BBC:

The 6ft 6in (2m) creature was almost perfectly preserved in limestone, thanks to a volcanic eruption that had buried it in north-east China.

And the 125-million year-old fossil suggests many other dinosaurs, including velociraptors, would have looked like “big, fluffy killer birds”.

But it is unlikely that it could fly.

note also:

There are [museum] storerooms full of new dinosaur fossils that have never been studied before.

And not on the open market as well?

See also:

A newly identified species of feathered dinosaur is the largest ever discovered to have a well-preserved set of bird-like wings, a study suggests.

Palaeontologists working in China unearthed the fossil remains of the winged dinosaur – a close cousin of the Velociraptor made famous by the Jurassic Park films.

Not for the fainthearted:

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4 Replies to “Big fluffy bird from hell?”

  1. 1
    ppolish says:
    July 22, 2015 at 12:23 pm

    Good thing the Big Fluffy Birds from Hell left no ancestors whew. Wiped right of the planet boom. Also good that Small Fluffy Birds from Heaven survived. Went forth and multiplied.

    Wonder if the feathered raptor tasted like chicken….

  2. 2
    Jorge says:
    July 22, 2015 at 1:04 pm

    The stories generated by unconstrained imagination combined with computer graphics are not only amazing, they’re also entertaining. But are they science? Only to those predisposed to believe the stories.

  3. 3
    ppolish says:
    July 22, 2015 at 1:39 pm

    Analysis of the fossil evidence is science, Jorge. Paleontologists are having a field day. But the “science” of how feathers were created is questionable. NS & RM lol.

  4. 4
    0812681 says:
    July 27, 2015 at 11:31 am

    An article related to this subject

    https://cosmosmagazine.com/life-sciences/great-dinosaur-fossil-hoax

    The problem of faked fossils in China is serious and growing. Rather than being excavated by palaeontologists on fossil digs, most of the region’s fossils are pulled from the ground by desperately poor farmers and then sold on to dealers and museums.

    …………

    Having thousands of farmers looking out for fossils is a double-edged sword. Though many more fossils are being discovered, they are collected and prepared in a way that destroys much of the scientific information. If scientists don’t know which location and rock layers the fossils come from, they can’t precisely pinpoint their age and struggle to confirm their veracity.

    ………..

    Another much more serious problem, however, is posed by faked and manipulated specimens. The best-known example is the Archaeoraptor, named by National Geographic. The episode drew public attention to the scale of the problem, and also to the difficulty of identifying a fossil hoax.

    ……………….

    Fossils can be faked in a variety of ways. Sometimes they’re hewn from parts from the same species but come from different individuals, so you might have a Microraptor skull, tail and body all from different individuals. Another method involves combining the parts of different species to make a complete fossil that appears to be a new animal. “Dinosaurs are very similar to birds, so sometimes these fossils combine different birds, different dromaeosaur specimens, or even birds with dinosaurs,” Xu says. But the most extreme kind of forgery takes fragmentary fossils and carves out the missing parts from the stone.

    ……

    It’s a significant hurdle to good science, and one that can’t easily be solved.

    As palaeontology has boomed in China so has the museum sector, and new institutions cropping up across the nation have fuelled the market for specimens to fill them. Sometimes these institutions, especially small regional museums, have no trained scientists, and display many fakes alongside real fossils.

    In Shandong Province, 100 kilometres south of Beijing, mineral magnate Zheng Xiaoting has used wealth amassed from gold mining to build the largest collection of complete dinosaur fossils anywhere in the world. The Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature has more than 2,300 specimens of early birds (including around 600 examples of Confuciusornis) and more than 1,000 dinosaur fossils, including hundreds of feathered specimens, some described in the top journals Science and Nature. According to Chiappe, however, even wonderful museums such as this are not immune to the problem of fossil fakery.He believes many fossils at Tianyu have been purchased from diggers without documentation or detailed stratigraphic information.

    Based on recent trips to China, Chiappe believes around 50% of specimens he’s seen in regional museums have been enhanced. “Sometimes that’s not important. It’s just a little thing that you can highlight and say, ‘Well, the left hand was sculpted … I’m going to exclude this from my study’,” he says. “But sometimes it’s more significant.”

    ………..

    An investigative report published in Science in 2010 revealed that as many as 80% of marine reptile fossils on display in Chinese museums had been altered or manipulated. Unfortunately, there are few solutions to the problem of faked fossils in China. Laws that forbid the sale of fossils have stemmed some of the trade (they have harsh penalties – ranging from significant fines to execution – but are rarely enforced), yet much of it continues on the black market.

    …………

    After the Archaeoraptor fiasco that proved so embarrassing for National Geographic, the magazine’s then editor Bill Allen, brought in journalist Lewis M. Simons to investigate. Simons reported in the October 2000 edition that it was: “A tale of misguided secrecy and misplaced confidence, of rampant egos clashing, self-aggrandisement, wishful thinking, naive assumptions, human error, stubbornness, manipulation, backbiting, lying, corruption, and, most of all, abysmal communication.”

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