As far as I can tell, the BBC was the only publication to report Currie’s suppositions about this latest dino’s possibly arboreal lifestyle. But I haven’t seen other paleontologists questioning those hypotheses, or questioning the finding in general. If you have, I hope you’ll let us know.

It had feathers? Where did that information come from? Dr. Currie isn’t exactly known for his impartiality and rigorous scientific examination of evidence that he thinks may confirm his own beliefs. E.g. the infamous dino-bird that 6 months later was found to be two fossils put together…although at least two researchers within weeks publicly announced it was most likely two fossils, they were ignored. Scientific American (and Dr. Currie) ended up with egg on their face for their over-the-top proclamations, and SA later had an article on why they failed to detect the fraud (human biases and wanting something to be true, failure to think critically).

Looking things up I see they’re saying this small dinosaur is fully feathered and was probably warm-blooded.?! I’m just having difficulty believing this because if it was fully-feathered or had “long feathers” then shouldn’t this have been noticed in the fossil? Instead, it was stored away for 25 years…not something you’d do with a fossil showing evidence of feathers. Since there were many fossils found, did any of them show evidence of feathers?

This seems like wholesale conjecture on their part, and now I’m wondering how much of the other information is just wish-fulfilment thinking (e.g. fused pelvis, climbed trees, was carnivorous). I think that before we promote this find as a feathered dinosaur, we should wait till others have examined it carefully so we don’t repeat the same mistake we did a decade ago. Let’s see what an impartial study will reveal. Dr. Currie may not have learned his lesson, but one would hope the rest of us did.

I hope Discover has a follow up on this story either confirming the conjecture (that’d be fantastic and exciting!!) or demonstrating that too much was read into the fossils (disappointing but at least honest…and honesty is what science is about).

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