Velociraptor Was a ‘Fluffy, Feathered Poodle From Hell’

...the real Velociraptor was a lapdog-sized predator covered in feathers. Palaeontologists have known this for a while. If you look at the arm bones of Velociraptor you can see a row of bumps, identical in size and shape to the quill knobs of living birds: the anchor points for big wing feathers. But because Velociraptor hasn’t been found in the perfect geological settings that fossilise soft tissues, we don’t know exactly what its feathers would have looked like.

But we have a better idea now, thanks to the discovery of a spectacular new dinosaur from northeastern China that I studied with my colleague, Junchang Lü of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences.

Our new dinosaur, Zhenyuanlong, is one of the closest cousins of Velociraptor. Its gorgeous chocolate-coloured skeleton was found by a farmer in 125-million-year-old rocks that were laid down in a quiet lake buried by volcanic ash. It’s just the right environment for preserving the soft bits that usually decay before a fossil is formed.

Image: Softpedia, Luis Rey

Zhenyuanlong is covered in feathers. Simple hairy filaments coat much of the body, larger veined feathers stick out from the tail, and big quill-pen-feathers line the arms, layered over each other to form a wing. This is a dinosaur that looks just like a bird. If you could see it alive you would probably make no distinction between it and, say, a turkey or a vulture.

Look at Zhenyuanlong and you see what the real Velociraptor would have been like. Far from being a scaly-skinned reptilian monster, Velociraptorwould have been a fluffy, feathered poodle from hell.

...

And this is why the discovery of Zhenyuanlong is really important. It gives us new insight into this incredible moment in evolution. Zhenyuanlong is fairly large for a close relative of birds, two metres long from snout to tail. It also has much shorter arms than Velociraptor or birds. A big, short-armed animal probably wasn’t flying, so what was it doing with its wings? We don’t know for sure.

This opens up a whole new mystery for us to solve: why did wings evolve? Did they evolve for flight, or did they first develop for something else, and were later co-opted to be used as an airfoil? We don’t know the answer yet, but since new fossils of bird-like dinosaurs are being found at an incredible rate, maybe we’ll have it solved by the time the next Jurassic Park comes out.

Stealing the headline, because that just couldn't be bettered.

Male Preference for Optimal Lumbar Curvature, or...

Huh, this is interesting I guess.

A psychology study from The University of Texas at Austin sheds new light on today's standards of beauty, attributing modern men's preferences for women with a curvy backside to prehistoric influences.

The study, published online in Evolution and Human Behavior, investigated men's mate preference for women with a "theoretically optimal angle of lumbar curvature," a 45.5 degree curve from back to buttocks allowing ancestral women to better support, provide for, and carry out multiple pregnancies.

"What's fascinating about this research is that it is yet another scientific illustration of a close fit between a sex-differentiated feature of human morphology—in this case lumbar curvature—and an evolved standard of attractiveness," said the study's co-author David Buss, a UT Austin psychology professor. "This adds to a growing body of evidence that beauty is not entirely arbitrary, or 'in the eyes of the beholder' as many in mainstream social science believed, but rather has a coherent adaptive logic."

This research, led by UT Austin alumnus and Bilkent University psychologist David Lewis, consisted of two studies. The first looked at vertebral wedging, an underlying spinal feature that can influence the actual curve in women's lower backs.

About 100 men rated the attractiveness of several manipulated images displaying spinal curves ranging across the natural spectrum. Men were most attracted to images of women exhibiting the hypothesized optimum of 45 degrees of lumbar curvature.

"This spinal structure would have enabled pregnant women to balance their weight over the hips," Lewis said. "These women would have been more effective at foraging during pregnancy and less likely to suffer spinal injuries. In turn, men who preferred these women would have had mates who were better able to provide for fetus and offspring, and who would have been able to carry out multiple pregnancies without injury."

The second study addressed the question of whether men prefer this angle because it reflects larger buttocks, or whether it really can be attributed to the angle in the spine itself.

Approximately 200 men were presented with groups of images of women with differing buttock size and vertebral wedging, but maintaining a 45.5-degree curve. Men consistently preferred women whose spinal curvature was closer to optimum regardless of buttock size.

Hmm, I wonder how this is being covered by other news outlets...

Really ?

Classy headline yo.

Business Insider Australia, huh.

That's...not...what they said.

'Better workers' ?  Well credit for least sexy picture, Telegraph.

Maybe I should just stick to the BBC.  Gah, and now I'm blinded by excessive whitespace, as the BBC push what was the mobile site onto the desktop.  And another site falls victim to the cult of flat design.  Well at least they've lost the hyper-pixelated pictures that used to plague the mobile site.