NPR reports:

Paleontology can be quite physical.

In 2016, David DeMar was doing field work in the rocky badlands of Montana in what’s known as the Hell Creek Formation.

“We all get down on our hands and knees,” he recalls. “And I start crawling up the hill and I noticed this little dark, round object on the ground. It was kind of odd.”

DeMar, a lab manager at the Burke Museum in Seattle, picked up the cherry-sized fossil.

“I start looking at the surface of it,” he says. “And then I rolled it over and I was like, ‘You got to be kidding me.'”

Embedded in a small crack on the surface was a tiny fossilized branching structure. As it turned out, this was the first fossilized feather from this part of the world.

In addition, “it is, without a doubt, the best feather we’ve ever found from the age of dinosaurs,” says Jingmai O’Connor, a bird expert and an associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

The researchers say the plume, which they describe in the journal Current Biology, is part of a fossil assortment that may reveal part of a late Cretaceous food web from some 66 million years ago. And they speculate it could help explain why, around that time, many types of ancient birds died out alongside the dinosaurs after a giant asteroid collided with the Earth — while others survived to give rise to the birds we know today. [Continue reading…]