Cretaceous birds wings preserved in amber

Alessandra Kelley

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http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36651471

Two tiny birds wings a few centimeters long have been found preserved in 99-million-year-old amber from Burma.

Exquisite detail has been preserved in the feathers, including traces of colour in spots and stripes.

The wings had sharp little claws, allowing the juvenile birds to clamber about in the trees.

The wings were juvenile, not fully fledged. They are not from a modern family of birds, but a close cousin whose lineage died out with the dinosaurs.
 

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Cue SyFy/Asylum film Deathwing about scientists cloning and reviving this species (only to discover that it's highly venomous and aggressive, with a taste for B-movie actors) in three... two...
 

Albedo

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Cue SyFy/Asylum film Deathwing about scientists cloning and reviving this species (only to discover that it's highly venomous and aggressive, with a taste for B-movie actors) in three... two...

At 2-3 cm long, it would take a whole flock of them, starling-like, to eat an average B-movie actor. Think air piranhas.

Clone a gloriously feathered T. rex, on the other hand ... Why hasn't that movie been made yet? (Oh yeah, because the makers of Jurassic World erroneously thought that birds aren't already vicious, terrifying hellbeasts, and feathered dinosaurs wouldn't be scary enough. Yeah, right.)
 

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At 2-3 cm long, it would take a whole flock of them, starling-like, to eat an average B-movie actor. Think air piranhas.

Clone a gloriously feathered T. rex, on the other hand ... Why hasn't that movie been made yet? (Oh yeah, because the makers of Jurassic World erroneously thought that birds aren't already vicious, terrifying hellbeasts, and feathered dinosaurs wouldn't be scary enough. Yeah, right.)

Scientific accuracy has never been an Asylum specialty. They've done deadly insect swarms; deadly bird swarms is only a tweak of the CGI away. Maybe the revived birds could move in compact cylindrical flocks as they stalk prey - a pternado, if you will. (Please refer to the remark about Asylum scientific accuracy...)

Besides, they're from the Age of Dinosaurs. If popular media's taught me nothing else, it's that everything in the Age of Dinosaurs is automatically a threat to humans (with the exception of Dinosaucers and Bunjees, though the latter appear to have evolved in such a bizarre manner that they may actually have been an invasive species that escaped from extraterrestrial exploration vessels.)
 

Albedo

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Scientific accuracy has never been an Asylum specialty. They've done deadly insect swarms; deadly bird swarms is only a tweak of the CGI away. Maybe the revived birds could move in compact cylindrical flocks as they stalk prey - a pternado, if you will. (Please refer to the remark about Asylum scientific accuracy...)

Besides, they're from the Age of Dinosaurs. If popular media's taught me nothing else, it's that everything in the Age of Dinosaurs is automatically a threat to humans (with the exception of Dinosaucers and Bunjees, though the latter appear to have evolved in such a bizarre manner that they may actually have been an invasive species that escaped from extraterrestrial exploration vessels.)
Pteranado? You know you'd watch it. Though wouldn't this would be more of a dinonado?

You know, it wouldn't be hard for Asylum to make a scientifically more accurate dinosaur movie than the JP/W movies. At this point, practically anything would be more scientifically accurate than those steaming piles of triceratops s#¥+. Even if their CGI isn't as crash hot. they could even make that their thing: cartoonishly shoddy effects, but impeccably researched and up to date.
 

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Pteranado? You know you'd watch it. Though wouldn't this would be more of a dinonado?

You know, it wouldn't be hard for Asylum to make a scientifically more accurate dinosaur movie than the JP/W movies. At this point, practically anything would be more scientifically accurate than those steaming piles of triceratops s#¥+. Even if their CGI isn't as crash hot. they could even make that their thing: cartoonishly shoddy effects, but impeccably researched and up to date.

I'd watch Pteranado the same way I watched Sharknado 1 and 2 - with the Rifftrax crew.

As for JP, to be fair, the first movie came out before the feathered-dino theory was generally popular, at least to the public. IIRC, it was considered more accurate and up-to-date than many Hollywood dino movies for advocating warm-blooded dinos and the bird link - I can't remember if Michael Crichton even had that much in his book. (And seeing those guys on the big screen for the first time was one of those great cinematic sense-of-wonder moments that will never be replicated.) The rest of the series kept them featherless for "continuity" purposes, they claim. Mostly, though, they aren't meant to be scientific. They're meant to be big stompy monsters rawring at puny humans... Asylum with a bigger CGI budget, really. (But, then, I wasn't as impressed as I'd hoped to be with Jurassic World - JP was a better movie on almost every level. And it totally ripped off How to Train Your Dragon 2 at the ending, there, with the battle of wills... but I digress.)