Day One of the St Leger Festival managed to show a loss despite four winners - but that was down to winning favourites and underperforming long-shots and losing exactas and too many selections and the folly of the author. Yes, I turned a profit because, as I indicated at the beginning, I had lumped on the first two favourites, so there was a cushion. I can only hope you read between the lines and did the same.
Talking of trying to extract some good from the mire, American palaeontologists have this week managed to get a real feather in their crap, whilst discovering yet another tiny piece of the “How the hell did we get here - despite everything?” puzzle
The clue to the meaning of life and everything, as Douglas Adams put it, lay in the fossilised turd of a dinosaur. Some 66 million years ago, a tyrannosaur, possibly a youthful T. rex, possibly its smaller relative Nanotyrannus, ate a diving bird for lunch. What remained of the meal eventually became a reddish-brown stone about half the size of a golf ball, and in 2016, palaeontologist David DeMar Jr found it while scrambling around Montana’s Hell Creek Formation looking for fish fossils.
When he looked at the small fossil through his hand lens, he saw something extraordinary: a tiny feather.
The subsequent CT scans produced the full menu—more feathers, gar-fish scales and the leg bones of a hesperornithiform. These were aquatic birds, rather like modern divers (or loons as the yanks call them), and the feathers were exceptionally well preserved. Some possessed the square shaft and sponge-like interior associated with modern birds, suggesting excellent waterproofing. But the same animal apparently retained smaller, fuzzier and more primitive body feathers.
And this may matter.
When the ELE (Extinction Level Event) asteroid arrived, the resulting darkness and cold eliminated most dinosaurs, including nearly every bird lineage. Only the ancestors of modern birds survived. It has been suggested that living near water saved them—but hesperornithiforms lived near water and became every bit as extinct as everybody else. Researchers now wonder whether the ancestors of modern birds possessed better insulation or moulted their feathers more efficiently. The primitive body covering of their cousins may simply have been inadequate for the catastrophic “impact winter.” It remains a hypothesis, not one of those occasions when scientists announce that everything previously believed was wrong. But it is a splendid clue.
So there we have it: T. rex eats a bird, takes a dump, and 66m years later we have Crows.
It’s that sort of deeply scientific approach and understanding that has produced today’s selections!
