Comments on: An Ode to Archaeopteryx

By: Paleontologists Unveil the 11th Archaeopteryx | Dinosaur Tracking

Paleontologists Unveil the 11th Archaeopteryx | Dinosaur Tracking — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 15:54:03 +0000

[...] the 150th anniversary of when the iconic feathered dinosaur was named. But shortly afterwards, a controversial paper in Nature in July proposed that the creature—widely hailed as the first bird—was further removed from [...]

By: Dinosaur Sighting: A Special Archaeopteryx 150th Anniversary Edition | Dinosaur Tracking

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 16:59:39 +0000

[...] Located on the campus of Ludwig Maximillian University, the museum has a quaint, meditative quality that outstrips its otherwise aged appearance. When I visited, high school art students were sketching the fossils of their choosing; had they not been there, I’d have been mostly on my own. All the captions were in German, understandably, so I was left with just my imagination to decipher the stories behind these dinosaurs and other fossils. Considering that most of what I know about dinosaurs I learned from Brian, I had a great time comparing notes from three years of producing the blog to the objects in front me. For instance, on the second floor was the museum’s shrine to Archaeopteryx, including a couple of model reconstructions and the Munich specimen, a subject that we’ve covered heavily in this space. The 150-million-year-old Archaeopteryx historically has been considered the direct ancestor of birds, a designation that is recently under dispute. [...]

By: Rank your religiousness. - Page 197

Rank your religiousness. - Page 197 — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 22:11:36 +0000

[...] one of the places where the fossil record has been particularly rich is in feathered dinosaurs. http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/dino…archaeopteryx/ As for the coelacanth, we've got a lot of information on those, as it turned out the thing wasn't [...]

By: Fatboy

Fatboy — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 18:33:48 +0000

At the risk of blogwhoring, I wrote a review on my own site of Peter Wellnhofer's book, Archaeopteryx: The Icon of Evolution. It's relevant, because I got the book from the Houston Museum of Natural Science when I went to see the Thermopolis specimen while it was on travel, and I spent a few paragraphs at the beginning of that entry describing the fossil. I thought it was amazing. I was really struck by the level of detail in some of the feather imprints. It's something photos just don't do justice to.

By: Velociraptor

Velociraptor — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 07:39:19 +0000

The poor Archaeopteryx – 150 years and people still can’t make up their minds about it.

By: Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.

Thomas R. Holtz, Jr. — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 14:44:56 +0000

In my updated lecture notes for my dinosaurs class, I show (here) that the different alternative position for archaeopterygids really aren't that far off from each other.