Two months ago, I wrote a short piece for Nature News about a collection of eleven feathers locked in Cretaceous amber that had been discovered in western Canada. These bits of ancient plumage were not like the flattened, carbonized feathers which surround the bodies of dinosaurs found in China’s Cretaceous ashfall beds – they were the actual tissues which covered the bodies of 70 million year old theropod dinosaurs. Which feathers belonged to early birds and which belonged to their non-avian dinosaur relatives is uncertain, but the fact that such intricate structures were so perfectly preserved is wonderful.

But there was something I missed when I wrote that article. A few months earlier, in the journal PALAIOS, Auburn University paleontologists