Caught in the Act

Man, waking up to NPR in the morning sure is enhancing my education about dinosaurs.

First there was the discovery, by looking hard through a microscope at the shape of the pigments in fossilized dinosaur feathers, that we can compare those shapes to bird feathers today and guess at colors. Some dinosaurs were apparently a colorful lot. I hadn't previously realized that we knew dinosaurs had feathers.

Then this morning there was the exiting new pre-historic scene caught in the fossil record. A baby sauropod hatches amid a field of other sauropod eggs in what is now India, to find itself regarded by a gigantic, coiled, and hungry snake. Bummer. Good thing in that moment sand or snow or whatever it was buried the whole thing, allowing it to avoid one certain death by abruptly experiencing another.