Ancient Chinese Bird kept Feathers Colors 130 Million Years

What's dope is that it only needs to preserved that well once, then it's pretty much around forever (barring some catastrophic event) What I find REALLY amazing is that something like this was actually found near the surface. I was going to make a sarcastic joke about this, but this thing lived as long before the catastrophic event that wiped out the dinosaurs as we live after it.

The Wikipedia page for has one. The genus has been known since 2008. That was prior to better knowledge of its colours, but the image is fairly similar to what the article says. Trees and grass are green and brown. Lots of birds are black. I feel like that would be hard to guess at. But who knows. I'm just a dude on the internet. There are marshes and bogs that are anaerobic environments or otherwise hostile to bacteria (e.g. hostile pH range). This dude was found after being submerged in a bog for over 2000 years so if he hadn't been unearthed he may have eventually turned into a fossil.

Doesn't necessarily mean it got cold/froze. I think all that is really required is rapid burial and anoxic conditions so that the usual culprits which decompose organic matter can't function. Then it needs to be buried to sufficient depth to lithify and subsequently be exhumed to the surface where we can find it. Also helps if the burial/exhumation process is 'gentle' so that the rock (and by extension the fossil) never experiences much strain heat alteration . its not anoxia per se, it needs to be removed from the biochemical system, and from a situation where any decomposition, aerobic or anaerobic can occur. rapid burial is the most common way this happens, but there are other ways preservation can occur, like tar pits for example.

Usually these sorts of fossils were created in still ponds or pools, where theres little water movement. Silt or volcanic ash often bury the animal or plant and this creates a layer where no oxygen or bacteria can get to the corpse. After a few hundred such events the original body is well buried and begin fossilization. The Driftwood fossilbeds near smithers bc are the remains of stagnant lakes and ponds which were covered by ash in periods of vulcanization during the early Eocene. These fossilbeds have some of the best preserved fossils of insects ever found, including mosquitoes, black flys, damsil, and dragon flies. Fish and even bird fossils have come from this site, and it was just down the road from my homestead.

Geology student here. This type of preservation is soft body preservation also known as Lagerstatte. Lagerstatten fossils are typically found in sedimentary rocks which are formed in anoxic environments ( very low or no oxygen ) which minimises the amount of bacteria and predators which would decay or feed on the corpse. Without knowing the exact formation this was found in I can't say for sure the environment in which this was preserved.

Sometimes a body can avoid this by being quickly buried. It will still decompose, but slowly, and it often leaves a hollow that gets filled in with something else once the mud and other sediments around it have hardened. Very rarely an actual body part (usually bone) can be preserved, but most often it is replaced entirely with a natural mineral. There have been plenty of examples of dinosaur skin imprints, but recently, a Psittacosaurus was discovered with potentially revealing melanosomes, much in the same vein as this example. This a fairly new way of looking for revealing coloring patterns from well preserved fossils.

I can't remember the source, but apparently the science behind the color of feathers has not been figured out yet and they are working on it. The color in feathers seems to stay around indefinitely without degrading and they don't know why. I think the density of people is more important because its more likely for people to find stuff that way. In the US where I am from, we have a lot of farmland and open areas, but those areas arent as dense with people. Thats just a guess though. Well, yes, that is a part of it. Compare to China to Eastern North America, which had most of its fossils destroyed in the ice ages - there's far less there, and what is there is less well preserved.

America's midwest has yielded a lot in the past. There was actually a period during the late 1800s nicknamed the bone wars when several prominent fossil hunters had something of a race to find the most fossils that turned into a feud. China's huge and there's a lot of mining and other earthworks going on. China's industrialization is also relatively recent so they're finding a lot of fossils now rather than a 150 years ago when the West was finding a lot.