© W. I. Sellers/Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesChemistry in colour
It boasts more than just beautiful impressions of long-gone feathers. One of the world's most famous fossils - of the earliest known bird,
Archaeopteryx - also contains remnants of the feathers' soft tissue.
"It's amazing that that chemistry is preserved after 150 million years," says Roy Wogelius, a geochemist at the University of Manchester, UK. Wogelius and colleagues scanned the "Thermopolis specimen" using a powerful X-ray beam from a synchrotron at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource in California.
The synchrotron excites atoms in target materials to emit X rays at characteristic wavelengths. The scan reveals the distribution of elements throughout the fossil. The green glow of the bones in this false-colour image shows that
Archaeopteryx, like modern birds, concentrated zinc in its bones. The red of the rocks comes from calcium in the limestone that had encased the fossil since the animal died.
Copper and zinc are key nutrients for living birds, and their presence in the fossil bones shows the evolutionary link with dinosaurs. The study also revealed phosphorous along the main shaft of the feathers in the fossil: palaeontologists had long thought that only impressions remained.
Comment: Readers' comments to the above article:
Jack Sarfatti 29 April, 2010 Jack Sarfatti 29 April, 2010 Guy Lyon Playfair 29 April, 2010
Also 'uninvited', no doubt, should be Sir Isaac Newton, whose research interests in creationism and alchemy make his participation in a scientific conference inappropriate. And wasn't Bohm once caught watching Uri Geller bending bits of metal?
Tom Ruffles 29 April, 2010 Brian Josephson 29 April, 2010 whippet 29 April, 2010 George Mickhail 29 April, 2010 Mike Towler 29 April, 2010 Bill Shroyer 29 April, 2010 Gary S Bekkum 29 April, 2010 Eric 29 April, 2010 Jack Sarfatti 29 April, 2010 Jack Sarfatti 29 April, 2010 Jack Sarfatti 29 April, 2010
One last remark - well maybe not last ;-) Towler's version is a blatantly false Orwellian re-writing of history as my email record will prove to any serious investigator.
Brian Josephson 29 April, 2010 Jack Sarfatti 29 April, 2010 Michael Pyshnov 30 April, 2010 Jack Sarfatti 30 April, 2010 etzel cardena 30 April, 2010 Brian Josephson 30 April, 2010 Don Quixote 30 April, 2010 Donald McLean 30 April, 2010 Antony Valentini 4 May, 2010