Episode 3: Dinosaur Lungs (ft Rachel Roth)
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GPNC naturalist Rachel can't stop talking about birds, so hosts Lyndzee and Emily indulged. The best thing about birds? They're literally dinosaurs, and it goes well beyond feathers frozen in stone. With discoveries like plumage coloration, dinosaur lungs, and literal therapod fledglings in amber, the things that make birds Rachel's favorite are dinosaur traits.
Below are some images and links for some of the stuff we talked about, and further reading! Go wild, look into this stuff. It's amazing.
Feathers
Baby Cretaceous Enantiornithes trapped in amber.
Cretaceous feathered dinosaur tail in amber.
Inaccurate thieving oviraptor from the movie Dinosaur.
An oviraptor from the Flaming Cliffs in Mongolia, by paleoillustrator Emily Willoughby.
Lungs, Respiration, and Bones
Air sac systems in Nigersaurus (top) and Saltasaurus (bottom). Credit: Ibiricu et al 2017
Reconstruction hypotheses for pneumatic diverticula in sauropod vertebrae (Brachiosaurus)
Blue = pneumatic diverticula (sinuses)