Aaron van der Reest, who's probably known he was a big deal ever since he found out his own name, is a paleontology student from the University of Alberta. He discovered the 75-million-year-old fossil of an Ornithomimus dinosaur with preserved tail feathers and soft tissue, in the Upper Cretaceous Dinosaur Park Formation.
Soft tissue was just recently discovered in T. rex samples in 2013, leading scientists to search for it in more fossils; they discovered it was present in 50 percent of their collected dinosaur fossils because of the unique way these animals stored iron in their blood stream. This new soft tissue in the Ornithomimus, however, tells an important evolutionary tale: It clarifies the relationship between Ornithomimus and its cousins, the ostrich and emu.
This is the first time that a land dinosaur fossil has still had the preserved skin going from the upper leg to the abdomen, which is key in understanding how the animals' joints worked, as well as how they moderated their body temperatures.
"We now know what the plumage looked like on the tail, and that from the mid-femur down, it had bare skin," said van der Reest in a press release from his university. "Ostriches use bare skin to thermoregulate [control their body temperature]."
The feathers are nearly identical to those of an ostrich, so it's very likely that this animal was doing exactly what ostriches do: using feathered regions to insulate their bodies, while certain parts were exposed and bare.
Because the plumage on this specimen is virtually identical to that of an ostrich, we can infer that Ornithomimus was likely doing the same thing, using feathered regions on its body to maintain body temperature. Those feathers are chemically pretty much identical to those of modern-day birds.
"It would've looked a lot like an ostrich," said van der Reest, who made the discovery while a freshman in undergrad. "It's pretty remarkable. I don't know if I've stopped smiling since."
The young scientist also maintains a public Flickr account where you can see his incredible photographs of excavation sites.
The discovery will affect future fossil expeditions and analyses, both in what paleontologists can expect of specimens, and what they can assume about the relationships between certain prehistoric species.
The findings, titled "A densely feathered Ornithomimid from the Upper Cretaceous Dinosaur Park Formation, Alberta, Canada," were published in the journal Cretaceous Research.
Photo: Wilson Hui | Flickr
