dinosaur and fish fossils<\/a>, but no feathers have been found there before.<\/p>\n“I was crawling up a rocky outcrop collecting fish fossils when I came across a dark, reddish-brown nodule about half the size of a golf ball,” Dr DeMar said.<\/p>\n
“I picked it up and scanned its surface through my hand lens, and that’s when I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, a tiny fossil feather.”<\/p>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/4JIGTSR_89f5298364b2ad283eb28a326fe4a2ba_jpg.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
The fossil feather was found preserved in a coprolite \u2014 also known as dinosaur poo.<\/p>\n
Supplied: O\u2019Connor et al<\/p>\n
Researchers don’t know which dinosaur made the coprolite, but they thought it could have been a Tyrannosaurus rex or Nanotyrannus based on its size and contents.<\/p>\n
At some point, the fossilised faeces broke open, exposing a beautifully preserved feather from 66 million years ago – about the time most dinosaurs were wiped out.<\/p>\n
“This is really exciting because this is from a place like Hell Creek, which is one of, if not the most, studied Late Cretaceous terrestrial fossil-bearing geologic unit,” Dr O’Connor said.<\/p>\n
“People have been going there for 110-plus years, many teams from many museums.”<\/p>\n
Micro-CT scanning revealed the coprolite contained multiple feathers, tiny fish scales and leg bones from a small bird.<\/p>\n
Dr O’Connor said the four dinosaur species that could have made the coprolite were unlikely to have eaten fish.<\/p>\n
“We hypothesise that those tiny fish scales were in the stomach of the bird when the bird was consumed,” she said.<\/p>\n
“So this coprolite actually records two different food web interactions.”<\/p>\n
Stunning feather from extinct bird<\/p>\n
Steven Salisbury, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the University of Queensland, said the fossil was impressive.<\/p>\n
“There are quite a few fossils that show feathers, but most of the time you’re just looking at impressions of feathers \u2026 the actual feather is not there,” Dr Salisbury said.<\/p>\n
“This is cool because it’s actually the preserved feather in 3D.”<\/p>\n
![\"David](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/4JIGTSR_b7057bec63551659974ea0ea63530548_avif.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
David DeMar photographed the exposed feather upon its discovery in 2016.<\/p>\n
Supplied: David DeMar Jr<\/p>\n
The feather is thought to belong to a hesperornithiform, a type of aquatic, flightless bird that did not survive the mass dinosaur extinction 66 million years ago.<\/p>\n
Most bird groups, except for the earliest members of the birds alive today, were also wiped out at this time.<\/p>\n
“Hesperornithiformes are most closely related to modern birds, the crown bird group,” Dr O’Connor said.<\/p>\n
“[But] we can see that hesperornithiformes don’t have the full suite of modern plumage characteristics.”<\/p>\n
According to Dr O’Connor, plumage might have been the difference between life and death during the extinction event.<\/p>\n
“We can hypothesise that only crown birds had the full suite of \u2026 body feathers that are good for insulation, plus modern wing feathers.”<\/p>\n
Dr Salisbury said this line of thought was “intriguing”.<\/p>\n
“One of the great mysteries of any extinction event, and in particular the Cretaceous extinction event, is why some groups of animals get through, and others don’t,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I don’t think we know exactly what happened.”<\/p>\n
He said more fossils were needed to test the team’s hypothesis.<\/p>\n
Dr O’Connor said more coprolite fossils likely contain feathers, and hoped other researchers and museums would CT scan their fossil faeces to check for feathers.<\/p>\n
“It’s a bit of a call to action,” she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A piece of fossilised dinosaur poo contains one of the best-preserved feathers from the dinosaur age. A palaeontologist…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":596739,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[111,139,69,147],"class_list":["post-596738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596738\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/596739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}