Oh yeah, Palaeofail posts/explaining them! We do that here!In the spirit of our Palaeofail new year’
Oh yeah, Palaeofail posts/explaining them! We do that here!In the spirit of our Palaeofail new year’s tradition, we have a terrible Microraptor. Not the worst we’ve seen here, but…The wing feathers should be attached to the middle finger of each hand. There shouldn’t be a hand “coming out of the wing” - rather, the hand should be incorporated into the wing. Like in modern birds! Here’s that in an ostrich:(Image: A photograph of an ostrich’s hand. The large wing feathers extend from the second (middle) finger of the hand. As a bonus there are large claws! These are actually not uncommon on birds, and if you eat chicken wings you may very likely see keratin claws on them. [Source])Theropod dinosaurs had a “dewclaw” on each foot, which the artist added here. However, they added it on the wrong side of the foot! It’s the first toe, i.e., it’s homologous to your “big toe” or “thumb toe”, and as such it should be towards the middle of the body.This may or may not have been known at the time of this illustration, but Microraptor is also one of the few mesozoic dinosaurs for which we know its life colouration! To make a long story short, certain types of fossilisation can preserve the parts of cells that store pigments (melanosomes), and different pigments are in differently-shaped melanosomes. If we look at these under a high-powered microscope, we can thus figure out what colour the feathers were in life. And in Microraptor, it appears to have been black all over!(Image: A digital illustration of Microraptor in life, showing off its all-black plumage. Image by Julio Lacerda @paleoart [give him a follow if you haven’t already!]. [source])Most of the facts on the side of this book are true; however, it is not likely that its feathers made it unwieldy on the ground, and we don’t have any evidence of it being arboreal. -- source link