Greg Paul's prescient illustration of a Velociraptor with quilled arm feathers (on the left)  was prepared almost twenty years ago. © Gregory S. Paul

Isn’t it interesting that a high-power trio of scientists, Alan Turner of Columbia University , Pete Makovicky  of the Field Museum (an NGS grantee) and  Mark Norell of the American Musuem of Natural History have now identified quill knobs on a Velociraptor ulna (see Science )?

It was not so long ago that such a claim would have generated an outcry from a vocal minority of scientists who opposed the hypothesis of a bird-dinosaur link like Storrs Olson of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History and Alan Feduccia of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but I haven’t heard a peep, have you? I remember that Feduccia threatened to cancel his subscription to National Geographic he was so incensed with an article we published in 1998 on the dinosaurian origin of birds. I don’t know if he ever followed through on that, but when National Geographic published an article including “Archaeoraptor,” a fossil dino-bird that turned out to be a faked composite of two skeletons, he and his other colleagues of like mind screamed bloody murder (partly because they were suspicious of all “dinobirds,” but also because the creature had not yet been properly described in a scientific journal).

I have the dubious distinction of having written that article article back in November 1999 and remember distinctly the sharp tone of Storrs Olsen’s open letter which he sent to numerous scientists and which was reported heavily in creationist web sites as evidence against evolution. It was addressed to Dr. Peter Raven, chairman of the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration. I present here a couple choice bits from that letter:

“With the publication of "Feathers for T. rex?" by Christopher P. Sloan in its November issue, National Geographic has reached an all-time low for engaging in sensationalistic, unsubstantiated, tabloid journalism.”

and

“The idea of feathered dinosaurs and the theropod origin of birds is being actively promulgated by a cadre of zealous scientists acting in concert with certain editors at Nature and National Geographic who themselves have become outspoken and highly biased proselytizers of the faith. Truth and careful scientific weighing of evidence have been among the first casualties in their program, which is now fast becoming one of the grander scientific hoaxes of our age—the paleontological equivalent of cold fusion. If Sloan's article is not the crescendo of this fantasia, it is difficult to imagine to what heights it can next be taken.”

I don’t know what happened to vocal opposition of this sort. Olson, Feduccia and their colleagues were dutifully quoted by journalists in almost every news article on feathered dinosaurs back then. But as evidence to support the hypothesis has been pouring in, those opposing views quoted so often before in news media have trickled to nothing. So discoveries like the quill knobs on a Velociraptor are reported without mention of controversy.

Yet, this particular discovery should be controversial and generate discussion. Not because a dinosaur had feathers, but because it raises the nagging question of why a non-flying dinosaur had quilled feathers? Quilled feathers, as opposed to downlike “protofeathers” are necessary for flight in birds. There are the standard explanations for why they might appear in flightless dinosaurs: display, thermoregulation, and lift when running up inclines, for example, but another explanation is that quilled feathers are on Velociraptor because it was secondarily flightless, like penguins are today.

I’m sure that many paleontologists will remember that Greg Paul, who published Dinosaurs of the Air: The Evolution and Loss of Flight in Dinosaurs and Birds in 2002, has long argued that just because birds descended from dinosaurs doesn’t mean that the relationship can’t be reversed to produce flightless dinosaurs that descended from birds.

This new debate won’t be resolved anytime soon, but it will be interesting to hear the differing viewpoints. In the meantime, I’m interested in finding the earliest published illustration of Velociraptor that shows it with quilled arm feathers. What’s printed above is the earliest one I could find. It is by paleontologist Greg Paul and appeared in his book Predatory Dinosaurs of the World published in 1988. It is reprinted here with Greg's kind permission. Send anything you think might be earlier to stonesbonesnthings@gmail.com.

In the current issue of Nature you’ll find a much-awaited report on the bodies (as opposed to the heads) of the folks that lived at Dmanisi in Georgia (the former Soviet Republic) about two million years ago. The report was much-awaited because only the heads of four of the individuals discovered there have been thoroughly reported. That left many of us wondering what their bodies were like.

We knew their brains were small and early estimates of their height and weight showed they were small in body as well, but we didn’t have a good sense of their body proportions or skeletal details from the neck down. And the reason why we cared about their bodies so much was that a paradigm was about to be broken.