scaffolding

100 million years of evolution. that’s when researchers believe birds first started flapping on earth. owls, it appears, have been around for at least 80 million years. there is currently a great article in the new yorker about a paleontologist who believes he has found a site that answers a long-argued question of whether dinosaurs were killed by the single huge asteroid that hit the yucatan called the chicxulub asteroid, or whether dinosaurs were already going extinct due to volcanic activity well before that. the site he has discovered appears to contain a fossilized record of the exact day, and possibly the exact hour, that the asteroid hit. it is a record of the single day when the cretaceous period ended. the next day was the paleogene period. the era of dinosaurs ended that day, and the era of mammals began. one of the interesting things he has found is actual feathers, whose bases fit perfectly into the depressions in the arm bones of dinosaurs, proving not only that dinosaurs still existed up to the day of the asteroid impact, but that, in addition, at least some of them were provably feathered.

great horned owl wing rachises