Dinosaur tail found preserved in amber

[fuelair]

I was researching paleontologist O.C. Marsh for unrelated reasons, and was surprised to find he was given credit as one of the first to point out the link between birds and dinosaurs, in 1877! His rival was Thomas Huxley who may have said the same thing.

I don't know much about the history of dinosaur clasification, but that surprised me. I thought it moved in more of a straight line, but apparently the dinosaur-bird link was big in the late 19th Century, then it died out in the early 20th Century, then it came back in the modern day.

I looked into it more.
From http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/c/chatterjee-birds.html
The fact that theropods and birds always walked bipedally is intriguing and may indicate a common evolutionary history, Huxley argued. Bipedalism is a rare evolutionary event in the history of vertebrates and requires a great deal of balancing and coordination. In birds we see the culmination of this coordination and proprioception. Marsh (1877, 1880) embraced Huxley's proposal of a theropod-bird link when he described Cretaceous toothed birds such as Hesperornis and Ichthyornis.
In 1926, however, Gerhard Heilmann (1926) swept away the hypothesis of the theropod ancestry of birds in his influential book The Origin of Birds...

Really?

You left off Cope:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0486269175/ref=pd_luc_rh_bxgy_01_01_t_img_lh?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

And, there was a Murdoch Mystery that I am fairly certain was a riff on the two

 

[fuelair]

Oh, Cope was Marsh's enemy fellow dino bone hunter!!!

 

[fuelair]

Neat charty stuff: http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evograms_06

 

[Pup]

Yes, the whole Cope Marsh fight was what I was researching. Can't have one without the other!

 

[Red Baron Farms]

Fossils found in Siberia suggest all dinosaurs could have been feathered

 

[jonesdave116]

Fossils found in Siberia suggest all dinosaurs could have been feathered

Hmmm, I was about to object, but they say "......and feathers may have been lost as dinosaurs grew up and became larger."

Because the evidence from the Dakota fossil shows no evidence of it being feathered:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/12/photogalleries/dinosaur-pictures/index.html

 

[Red Baron Farms]

Hmmm, I was about to object, but they say "......and feathers may have been lost as dinosaurs grew up and became larger."

Because the evidence from the Dakota fossil shows no evidence of it being feathered:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/12/photogalleries/dinosaur-pictures/index.html

Well my take on it is similar but nuanced. I suspect feathers are a defining trait for dinosaurs much like hair/fur is a defining trait for mammals.

For example: You won't find much fur on a dolphin, hippo, or african elephant. And in a similar way there probably are many examples of dinosaurs that had little to no feathers. Yet the feather trait could be just as old as the first dinosaurs, meaning it could be a defining trait for all dinosaurs rather than just theropods. And it makes sense that a huge massive adult dinosaur could have molted and lost early downy feathers needed by hatchlings to stay warm. So even within a single species we could find both according to age and climate.