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b"We have merch available again!\\n\\nThanks to Eilee for suggesting this week's topic, Archaeopteryx!\\n\\nFurther reading:\\n\\nDinosaur feather study debunked\\n\\nArchaeopteryx fossil provides insights into the origin of flight\\n\\nAn Archaeopteryx fossil [By H. Raab (User: Vesta) - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8066320]:\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\nWe\\u2019ve had a lot of mammal episodes lately, so this week let\\u2019s learn about a reptile...uh, a bird. Not quite a bird, not exactly a reptile. That\\u2019s right, it\\u2019s an episode about archaeopteryx, a suggestion by Eilee!\\nA quick note before we start to say that I finally got around to setting up merch again if you want to order a t-shirt or water bottle or whatever with the podcast\\u2019s logo on it. I\\u2019m using Redbubble this time because they have a lot more items available than our previous vendor. There\\u2019s a link in the show notes.\\nWe also have new stickers and those are free, so if you want one, just drop me an email and let me know what your mailing address is. The new sticker is a drawing of a capybara made by me. Anyway, on to the archaeopteryx!\\nThe first archaeopteryx fossils were discovered in Germany in 1861. Before the first skeleton of an archaeopteryx was discovered, though, a single feather impression was found in a limestone quarry that has produced a lot of spectacularly well-preserved fossils. When the full specimen turned up later that same year, palaeontologists decided the feather came from the same animal.\\nThat decision has been questioned repeatedly over the years. A study conducted with laser imaging determined that the single feather was different from the feathers of other archaeopteryx specimens. Results of that study were published in 2019, but in October of 2020 results of a study conducted with a specialized electron microscope determined that the feather did come from an archaeopteryx. The 2020 study also found that the feather was black.\\nArchaeopteryx lived around 150 million years ago in what is now Europe. It was about the size of a crow but while it looked a lot like a bird, it also looked a lot like a little dinosaur. It had small teeth and a long lizard-like tail. Of the twelve Archaeopteryx fossils found so far, all but one have feather impressions that indicate it had flight feathers on its arms, or rather wings, but at least one specimen also had flight feathers on its legs, which are sometimes referred to as hind wings. These hind wings would have helped it maneuver through branches even though its front wings were limited in their range of motion. It was probably a slow flyer that ate whatever small animals it could catch.\\nThe wing feathers of archaeopteryx were very similar to those of modern birds, and a study published in late 2020 discovered another similarity. Birds molt their feathers and replace them the same way mammals shed hairs and regrow them, but it\\u2019s a little trickier for birds. A bird that loses too many feathers from its wings can\\u2019t fly until new feathers grow in. Modern birds solve this issue by molting only one pair of wing feathers at a time, and once the replacement grows in, the next pair is shed. The study examined fossilized archaeopteryx wings using a process called laser-stimulated fluorescence imaging, which can reveal details that aren\\u2019t otherwise visible. It discovered feather sheaths hidden under what would have been the skin of the wings, ready to grow new feathers. The feather sheaths were the same on both wings and resembled the molting pattern seen in modern falcons.\\nArchaeopteryx also had feathers on the rest of its body, but they aren\\u2019t well preserved so paleontologists can\\u2019t determine too much about them. They might have been more fluffy than sleek, like the soft downy feathers in young modern birds, or it might be that the fluffy feathers just happened to be the ones that were most preserved."