Feathered dinosaurs
The realization that dinosaurs are closely related to birds raised the obvious possibility that some dinosaurs had feathers.
Fossils of Archaeopteryx include well-preserved feathers, but it was not until the early 1990’s that clearly nonavian dinosaur fossils were discovered with preserved feathers.
Today there are more than a dozen genera of dinosaurs with fossil feathers, all of which are theropods.
Most are from the Yixian formation in China.
The fossil feathers of one specimen, Shuvuuia deserti, have even tested positive for beta keratin, the main protein in bird feathers, in immunological tests. Particularly well-preserved (and legitimate) fossils of feathered dinosaurs were discovered during the 1990s and 2000s.
The fossils were preserved in a Lagerstätte — a sedimentary deposit exhibiting remarkable richness and completeness in its fossils — in Liaoning, China.
The area had repeatedly been smothered in volcanic ash produced by eruptions in Inner Mongolia 124 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous Period.
The fine-grained ash preserved the living organisms that it buried in fine detail.
The area was teeming with life, with millions of leaves and the oldest known angiosperms, insects, fish, frogs, salamanders, mammals, turtles, lizards and crocodilians discovered to date. The most important discoveries at Liaoning have been a host of feathered dinosaur fossils, with a steady stream of new finds filling in the picture of the dinosaur-bird connection and adding more to theories of the evolutionary development of feathers and flight..
Evolution of the horse
The evolution in the structure of their teeth, odd-toed limbs, obvious mobility of the upper lip, and other aspects, joins the horse to the evolutionary line of odd-toed, hoofed mammals: the Perissodactyls.
The tapirs and rhinoceroses remained adapted to their original style of life, conserving forms suitable for life in tropical forests, but the evolutionary line of the horse mainly adapted to life on dryer land in the much-harsher climatic conditions of the steppes..
Trace fossil
Trace fossils are those details preserved in rocks that are indirect evidence of life.
While we are most familiar with relatively spectacular fossil hard part remains such as shells and bones, trace fossils are often less dramatic, but nonetheless very important.
Trace fossils include burrows, track marks, coprolites (fossilized feces), stromatolites (fossilized algal mounds), and rhizoliths or rhizocretions (fossil remains of roots)..
Cretaceous
The Cretaceous period is one of the major divisions of the geologic timescale, reaching from the end of the Jurassic period, about 146 million years ago (Ma), to the beginning of the Paleocene epoch of the Tertiary period (65.5 Ma).
The end of the Cretaceous also defines the boundary between the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras..

“This article is brought to you by Gus Woltmann”.