G T A

Paleontology was forever changed with the 1996 unveiling of the small Chi-nese Cretaceous dinosaur Sinosauropteryx, sporting a mane of thick laments along its back. With only a small black and white photo, the New York Times proclaimed that the structures were some sort of proto-feathers and some-how supported the theory that birds were dinosaur derivatives. e discovery was the apparent culmination of a paleontological revolution that started in the late 1960s when Yale’s John Ostrom discovered the birdlike dromaeosaur Deinonychus, reviving the hypothesis that birds evolved from dinosaurs. e hypothesis implied that ight must have originated from the ground up. e view for most of the 20th century was that birds originated from small tree-dwelling archosaurs (antecedents of dinosaurs) that developed ight by the more logical route taken by all other airborne vertebrates — parachuting and gliding, from the trees down. e next shock came just two years later when the editor of Nature triumphantly announced ‘the debate is over’. e cover story featured two putative dinosaurs