Innovation for Good: Feather Preserved in Dinosaur Dung Could Explain Why Birds Survived Mass Extinction

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A feather preserved inside dinosaur dung could help explain why birds survived the mass extinction that wiped out most life on Earth.

Specifically, it could explain whether it prepared a certain lineage of birds to weather the unnatural winter that followed in the wake of the asteroid impact.

Scientists at the Field Museum of Chicago say a dinosaur ate a bird around 66 million years ago, and that its dung preserved the best example of a feather ever found from the dinosaur age.

By studying the feather, American researchers have found clues that help explain why birds are the only group of dinosaurs that survived the mass extinction on Earth 66 million years ago.

“It’s such a beautiful, well-preserved feather, from such an unexpected source, and it’s exciting that it could help us answer this huge question in paleontology,” the study’s lead author Professor Jingmai O’Connor said.

Professor O’Connor has spent years studying fossilized birds to try to find out why only one group of birds called Neornithes survived. It’s a puzzle worth solving, as every living bird today is one of their descendants.

The fossil was discovered in 2016, by study co-author David DeMar, Jr., while conducting fieldwork in Montana.

“I was crawling up a rocky outcrop collecting fish fossils when I came across a dark, reddish-brown nodule about half the size of a golf ball,” he remembers. “I picked it up and scanned its surface through my hand lens, and that’s when I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, a tiny fossil feather.”

Scientists examined the specimen’s mineral composition and took CT scans of it. Not only did it contain multiple feathers, but also tiny fish scales from a gar, and leg bones from a bird called a hesperonithiform.

“Hesperornithiforms were aquatic birds, ecologically similar to loons,” said O’Connor. “Most couldn’t fly, and instead, they used their specialized feet to dive down into the water to hunt for things like fish.”

They are the earliest known avian lineage to lose flight in favor of a specialized foot-propelled diving lifestyle, but unlike the Neornithes, Hesperornithiforms did not survive beyond the Cretaceous era.

The feathers found in the droppings are the first hesperornithiform feathers ever found, and their features seem to represent a middle ground between feathers that existed then and those of our present time. O’Connor believes one of the main reasons Neornithes survived is down to differences in their feathers compared to other birds.

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“Some of these diving birds’ feathers seem to have been modern-looking and water-proof, but they also had some smaller, fuzzy, primitive body feathers that we associate with dinosaurs…” she said.

If the hesperornithiforms’ feathers weren’t as good at keeping their bodies warm as Neornithes’ feathers, O’Connor believes that could have been a major factor in their abilities to survive the impact winter following the asteroid strike.

“The hesperornithiforms retain primitive feather types that may not have been as efficient for insulation as modern plumaceous feathers, and that could explain why they went extinct along with the enantiornithines [another group of birds].”

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“We rarely find fossils of birds and even more rarely their feathers, giving us such important insight into the evolution of this key aspect of their biology,” said study co-author Professor Greg Wilson Mantilla, from the University of Washington.

The study was published in the journal Current Biology, and advocates for more CT scanning of existing fossilized dung samples held in collections on the off chance that more feathers could be contained therein.

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