4 Winged Birds and a European Stegosaurus

Dinosaur news!

The Times Online reports on January 23rd, 2007:

Scientists reconstructing the fossilised remains of a Microraptor gui have concluded that its legs were aerodynamically feathered and acted as a second set of wings to help it to glide between trees. ... [Researchers] said: "Aircraft designers have mimicked many of nature's flight inventions, usually inadvertently. Now it seems likely that Microraptor invented the biplane 125 million years before the Wright 1903 Flyer." ... Analysis of the fossil indicated that the bird was incapable of launching itself from the ground into flight or getting into the air from a running start. Instead, it would have launched itself from trees.

And LiveScience reports on the first appearance of a stegosaurus outside North America:

The scientists unearthed the new Stegosaurus fossils--which included a tooth and parts of the animal's spinal column and leg bones--near the city of Batalha, in central Portugal. Preliminary analyses show the fossils to be indistinguishable from a species previously found only in North America, called Stegosaurus ungulatus. ... The only other dinosaur for which bones have been found in both North America and Europe is a species of Allosaurus, a large meat-eating dinosaur similar to Tyrannosaurus rex, but without the latter's stubby meat-fork arms.

Loren Coleman's excellent Cryptomundo reports on it too, as well as its potential Pangaea confirmation, whilst throwing in the Cambodian stego carving that was recently uenearthed:

Perhaps it is nothing more than a rhinoceros? There is speculation that at one time or another Cambodia had Indian, Javan, and Sumatran rhinos living in the country. Or have Stegosaurs roamed Cambodia, less than 1000 years ago and Angkor's master artists created a representation of one, on a temple?