How colourful were dinosaurs.

[Damien Evans]

This seems as good a place as any to leave this:

Flight without Feathers

The picture shows feathers, just not on the wing membrane.

 

[macdoc]

Saw that article - ain't evolution grand

If you are stuck behind the NYT paywall



and

 

[Darwin123]

The picture shows feathers, just not on the wing membrane.

I conjecture that this creature was a glider, not a flier. I don't think
that gliding (i.e., not muscle powered) is a necessary step in the evolution of flight (muscle powered). The feather in this dinosaur is a feature which is not used in either flight or gliding.

Wing assisted climbing is conjectured to have lead to the evolution of flying. flying developed from wing assisted climbing without gliding as an intermediate step. Dinosaurs developed feather-like structures early for all sorts of reasons other than flight. However, juvenile dinosaurs that flapped their arms found they could climb up and down trees a lot easier than their relatives that kept their arms still. Juvenile birds still climb trees this way. Membranes would be useless for power assisted climbing.

Gliding is a good way to get from one branch to a another branch. It is more energy efficient within a tree than flying. Many animals other than bats can glide without actually flying. Membranes work very well for gliding. Bats are one of the few vertebrates that actually fly with membranes. Other vertebrates glide.

So it seems to me this dinosaur had feathers for reasons other than flying. Maybe the feathers were a decorative display, or maybe it kept the arms warm. However, its' life style required getting from branch to branch very often. So it evolved membranes on its arms to glide from branch to branch, usually within the same tree.

 

[macdoc]

Suggested reading.....

Feathers. see the science books list in the stickie....brilliant inof

 

[macdoc]

Not only colourful dinos.....but their eggs too...

First evidence that dinosaurs laid colourful blue-green eggs

22:00 21 May 2015 by Jeff Hecht
For similar stories, visit the Dinosaurs Topic Guide
The American robin lent its name to a striking shade of blue, but the vivid hue may have been colouring eggs long before the bird evolved – perhaps long before any birds evolved. It may have appeared in the dinosaur ancestors of birds that lived 150 million years ago.

Although recent studies have revealed the colours of dinosaur feathers, skin and scales, we had known nothing about the original colour of their eggs.

Ornithologists once assumed early birds, and the dinosaurs they evolved from, laid white eggs. But we know that some of the most ancient groups of birds still around – including the tinamou and emu – actually lay coloured eggs, points out Mark Hauber, an animal behaviourist at Hunter College in New York.

His group has discovered the chemical origin of the avocado-green from emu's eggs, as well as the blue of robin's eggs, the brown of chicken's eggs and the pinks and purples from the eggs of other birds belonging to ancient living groups. The colours come from the way that two pigments in the shell – biliverdin and protoporphyrin – blend with each other and with the calcium carbonate that makes most of the shel

http://www.newscientist.com/article...id-colourful-bluegreen-eggs.html#.VWDJNGCEJZ8

Raptor egg blue anyone

 

[Jrrarglblarg]

We call our chickens henosaurs for a reason.