Ornithomimid Dinosaur Feeding

In an article in Nature of August 30(available only to paying subscribers online),the beaks of ornithomimid dinosaurs are reveleaded to have comb-like soft tissue structures which indicate the animals used their beaks to sieve food from aqueous environments much like modern flamingos instead of using them to capture prey.

The other story floating around this week is about the ceratopsian fossil with feathers...

Wouldn't it be fun if they look just like those found on Sinosauropteryx!

I think it's more of a psittacosaurid with supposed fibers.

There're plenty of rumors swimming around about this thing (which I won't repeat here). Be interesting to see how it turns out....

Was this thread supposed to be entitled 'feathered ornithischian'? _Ornithosuchia_ was defined as birds and all animals sharing more recent ancestry with them than with crocodylians, so there are already PLENTY of feathered ornithosuchians.

(On a side note, the name _Ornithosuchia_ would be invalid under PhyloCode rules, since it does not include the eponymous _Ornithosuchus_ in its definition, nor, despite the original thinking, in its membership. Other names for this clade, such as _Ornithotarsi_ and _Avemetatarsalia_, have been proposed and may be favored.)

The Phylocode? Is it the analog of a New Testament of, or an addendem to, the Koran?

Cladistic guidebooks such as that of Brooks et al. (1984) are disconcerting in that the style, in its dogmatic assertion of the 'Rules,' reads more like the Koran than a work of science. ——P.C.H. Pritchard, 1994, 'Cladism, the Great Delusion,' Herpetol. Rev.

They don't. They are extremely long and seem to be localized to the dorsal side of the tail. Of all the Liaoning animals, the only ones with _Sinosauropteryx_-style integument are coelurosaurs. The psittacosaur structures could be homologous, although that would mean multiple lineages (at the *very* least, ceratopsids, hadrosaurids, and carnotaurines) would have to have lost fibrous integument.

There are other psittacosaur fossils from the Liaoning deposits which show scales like those found in other ornithischians, such as ceratopsids and hadrosaurids. Of course, I don't think there is any sauropsid which ever entirely lost all scales (snow owls?), so two forms of integument co-existing would be quite possible (and something had to cover everything besides the dorsal side of the tail).

Then again, there's also rumors that this fossil may be a hoax. Who knows? There really isn't much for us to go on at this point. (No one I've talked to even seems to know who was studying it, and it is apparently now in private hands.)