Exceptionally Preserved Bird Feathers Found in 66-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Coprolite

Paleontologists have discovered exceptionally preserved feathers of an ancient aquatic bird inside a fossilized dinosaur dropping in Montana. The feathers were found in the Hell Creek Formation, a geological formation in north-eastern Montana, and date back 66 million years to the time of the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs.

The feathers are remarkably well-preserved, with one scientist describing it as "like a feather you could pick up off the ground." According to the Field Museum's Jingmai O'Connor, this is the best-preserved feather ever recovered from dinosaur-age rock. The discovery provides rare insight into the evolution of feathers and may help explain why birds were able to survive the mass extinction event while other dinosaurs were not.

The fossilized dropping was discovered in 2016 by David DeMar, Jr at the University of Washington in Seattle, while he was collecting fish fossils. The feathers found in the coprolite are from a bird that was eaten and partially excreted by a dinosaur. This find pushes the evolution of modern-style feathers back by 10 million years, according to New Scientist.

Birds, specifically the ancestors of every bird alive today, known as neornithes, were the only dinosaurs to survive the mass extinction triggered by an asteroid strike.

Brief written by urgent.news from Sci.News, New Scientist — 2 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.