Science|A Feather Found in Dinosaur Poop Might Explain How Birds Beat Extinction

An extremely well-preserved bird feather from the age of dinosaurs has been found inside a fossilized piece of dinosaur poop — revealing how some bird species may have escaped extinction.

It is, so far, the only example of a dinosaur-era feather found within rock that wasn’t completely flattened through the centuries, making it the best preserved feather of its type. The first-of-its-kind discovery was described in a study published Sept. 10 in Current Biology.

“When they found this specimen, they knew it was important,” said Jingmai O’Connor, a paleontologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago who conducted the analysis of the feather once it was brought back to the museum’s lab.

The fossil was first uncovered in 2016 at the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, a beloved site for fossil-hunters in the badlands of the American west which dates back to when more fearsome creatures ruled land, sea and sky.

There, a researcher picked up a fossilized piece of poop from a large dinosaur, perhaps a Nanotyrannus or Tyrannosaurus rex. It split in half, revealing a tiny, yet well-preserved feather alongside fragments of avian bones and fish scales leftover from the bird’s final meal before being eaten.

Other feathers from the Mesozoic Era — the period of about 252 to 66 million years ago sometimes called the Age of Dinosaurs — have been found encased in amber, but they are usually alone. Because the newfound feather was found with bones and other material, the research team was able to gain a more complete view of prehistoric birds’ lives and physical features, moving closer to answering an age-old question in paleontology: Why are birds the only dinosaurs that survived?