My OperaAn Ancient Black Feather
Thursday, January 26, 2012 8:07:38 PM
A few days ago I visited a special exhibition in the natural history museum of Berlin called “Feathered Flight - 150 Years of Archaeopteryx”. The name Archaeopteryx derives from the Ancient Greek ἀρχαῖος (archaīos) meaning "ancient", and πτέρυξ (ptéryx), meaning "feather". It got its name from the first find of this rare bird/dinosaur, which was actually only a single feather found in 1860 near Solnhofen and described by Meyer in 1861.
Later fossil skeletons of the whole creature were found, and the original of the best preserved of these is on exhibition in the same natural museum of Berlin - the real thing - my picture here below is only of a mould exhibited in a museum at Solnhofen.
What the plumage looked like has been an item of discussion. Here is a a model of Archaeopteryx lithographica on display at the Oxford University Museum.
Recently it has been discovered that many feathers are preserved as melanosomes (containing light-absorbing pigments), and that the distribution of these structures in fossil feathers can preserve the colour pattern in the original feather. The discovery of preserved melanosomes opens up the possibility of interpreting the colour of extinct birds and other dinosaurs. An international team of scientists now finds that the well-preserved feather on Archaeopteryx's wing was black. The group located patches of hundreds of melanosomes encased within the fossil. The sausage-shape melanosomes were about 1 millionth of a meter long and 250 billionths of a meter wide — that is, about one-hundredth the diameter of a human hair in length and less than a wavelength of visible light in width. To determine the color of these melanosomes, researchers compared the fossilized structures with those found in 87 species of living birds that represented four classes of feathers — black, gray, brown and ones found in penguins, which have unusually large melanosomes compared with other birds. According to Ryan Carne the feather was predicted to be black with 95 percent certainty.
This all means that the Archaeopteryx lithographica might have looked a bit like this (with black feathers):
The findings were published online on 24 January 2012 in the journal Nature Communications. (The first colour study ever on an Archaeopteryx specimen)
In Danish:
http://videnskab.dk/miljo-naturvidenskab/mystisk-urfugl-havde-sorte-vinger
See also my posts:
Later fossil skeletons of the whole creature were found, and the original of the best preserved of these is on exhibition in the same natural museum of Berlin - the real thing - my picture here below is only of a mould exhibited in a museum at Solnhofen.
What the plumage looked like has been an item of discussion. Here is a a model of Archaeopteryx lithographica on display at the Oxford University Museum.
Recently it has been discovered that many feathers are preserved as melanosomes (containing light-absorbing pigments), and that the distribution of these structures in fossil feathers can preserve the colour pattern in the original feather. The discovery of preserved melanosomes opens up the possibility of interpreting the colour of extinct birds and other dinosaurs. An international team of scientists now finds that the well-preserved feather on Archaeopteryx's wing was black. The group located patches of hundreds of melanosomes encased within the fossil. The sausage-shape melanosomes were about 1 millionth of a meter long and 250 billionths of a meter wide — that is, about one-hundredth the diameter of a human hair in length and less than a wavelength of visible light in width. To determine the color of these melanosomes, researchers compared the fossilized structures with those found in 87 species of living birds that represented four classes of feathers — black, gray, brown and ones found in penguins, which have unusually large melanosomes compared with other birds. According to Ryan Carne the feather was predicted to be black with 95 percent certainty.This all means that the Archaeopteryx lithographica might have looked a bit like this (with black feathers):
The findings were published online on 24 January 2012 in the journal Nature Communications. (The first colour study ever on an Archaeopteryx specimen)
- http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21146-archaeopteryx-was-robed-in-black.html
- http://machineslikeus.com/news/winged-dinosaur-archaeopteryx-dressed-flight
- http://www.livescience.com/18085-winged-dinosaur-archaeopteryx-black-feathers.html
- http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2012/01/24/archaeopteryx-the-embargoed-tattoo/
In Danish:
http://videnskab.dk/miljo-naturvidenskab/mystisk-urfugl-havde-sorte-vinger
See also my posts:
- http://my.opera.com/nielsol/blog/2008/03/18/most-famous-fossil-i-was-in-berlin-all-last-week-the-timing-was-not-optimal
- http://my.opera.com/nielsol/blog/2007/06/14/interdisciplinarity
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