We know that birds are the last remaining avian dinosaurs, descendants of the theropod dinosaurs like the velociraptor.

Still, closely related as they might be, a chicken doesn't look much like how we picture a velociraptor.

But researchers have been trying to figure out which genetic changes caused dinos to change in appearance into modern birds, losing their arms, snouts, tails, and powerful legs.

Now, a group of researchers led by Joao Francisco Botelho of the University of Chile has solved another piece of that puzzle.

They've figured out why the fibula bone in birds — one of the two twin thin bones that sit side by side in a chicken leg — is too short and not as well developed as the fibula of their theropod ancestors.

And by tweaking certain genes to change bone growth, the researchers have shown they can reverse this process in chicken embryos and cause their legs to start to form in the more dinosaur-like structure.

The researchers didn't actually let these embryos grow to the hatching phase, but they did show that they've figured out how to reverse another step in evolution, able to make birds express throwback dinosaur traits.

They published these results in the journal Evolution.

Building a 'chickenosaurus'

These same researchers have done similar work in the past too, when they figured out how to make birds lose the opposable toe that lets them cling to branches to grow a more dinosaur-like foot.

Eventually, if someone can figure out how to reverse all the differences between modern birds and dinosaurs, we might be able to actually be able to make a sort of dino-bird, something with the legs, tail, and snout of a dinosaur.

It would be a dino-chicken, or a "chickenosaurus,"in the words of Jack Horner, the paleontologist who worked on "Jurassic World" (and the rest of the "Jurassic Park" films).

The group in Chile isn't trying to do that, they just want to figure out if they can explain the genetic changes that made modern birds look the way they do, compared to their ancestors.

"The experiments are focused on single traits to test specific hypotheses," Alexander Vargas of the University of Chile said in a press release announcing the finding. "Not only do we know a great deal about bird development, but also about the dinosaur-bird transition, which is well-documented by the fossil record. This leads naturally to hypotheses on the evolution of development, that can be explored in the lab."

Others, including Horner, are still interested in seeing if they can actually create a new little dinosaur.

It would be a small, feathered creature, with a tail that helps it balance, small arms with claws, and a toothy snout, instead of a beak.

"If we can make a dino-chicken, it's pretty cool,"Horner told Tech Insider in 2015.

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The dinosaurs never really went extinct — at least not in the way you might imagine. Instead, many of them evolved into a class of animals that's still very present on our planet: birds.

A new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, "Dinosaurs Among Us," shows how enormous, fearsome beasts like the Tyrannosaurs Rex became parrots and chickadees. This transition wasn't quick, and many of the famous dinosaurs we know today, like the T. Rex, sported feathers long before they resembled anything close to modern birds.

Check out these weird transitional forms that have changed much of what we thought we knew about the dinosaurs that ruled the Earth hundreds of millions of years ago.

Dinosaurs like the Yutyrannus huali, a 1.5 ton relative of T. rex that lived 125 million years ago, were covered in feathery fuzz. When scientists discovered this beast in 2012, it was some of the first concrete evidence that even the mighty T. rex might have been sort of fluffy. The name means "beautiful feathered tyrant."

While the jury is still out on whether the T. rex itself had feathers, many scientists now think they might have had some kind of proto-feathers — Jurassic Park be damned.

The T. rex even had a wishbone. Scientists once believe these bones (technically called furculae) helped strengthen bodies for flight. But this wishbone from the giant, earthbound T. Rex showed that its purpose was not just for flying.

That most urban of birds is now at work measuring the air quality over the famously smoky city of London.

Engineers at technology company Plume Labs trained 10 racing pigeons to wear tiny, specially designed backpacks full of equipment for measuring nitrogen dioxide and ozone.

They are carefully attended by a veterinarian and trained to fly at strategic heights over London during rush hour.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, they tweet results of the air tests upon request.

Introducing the #PigeonAir patrol team: Norbert, Coco and Julius. At your service! pic.twitter.com/N1vg5tZZak

— Pigeon Air Patrol (@PigeonAir) March 14, 2016

The three-day campaign – ending Wednesday – asks Londoners to help gather detailed, on-the-go, air-quality information by wearing similar sensing technology after the pigeons finish their rounds.

Pigeons fighting pollution: Simply tweet your London area to @PigeonAir& we'll tell you how toxic it is! #PigeonAirpic.twitter.com/S3CKPx35Ry

— Pigeon Air Patrol (@PigeonAir) March 14, 2016

Dr. Edward Wasserman, who has researched pigeons extensively at the Comparative Cognition Laboratory at the University of Iowa, says this publicity stunt is hardly the most innovative use of pigeons, which have been exploited for their homing abilities for thousands of years.

"Pigeons have, after all, been shown to be able to recognize individual human faces and discriminate among pieces of art, Monet versus Picasso," Dr. Wasserman says. "In terms of keeping them in laboratories, they’re great. They can do it all."

He says the pigeon's lab career began after World War II, when psychologist B.F. Skinner trained the birds to guide missiles toward enemy ships. In London, some medical labs have used them to carry blood samples back and forth from the hospital. He has studied their ability to read medical reports, which shows they can memorize how different images ought to look and sometimes tell the difference between them, according to NBC News.

"They’re a pleasure to work with," Wasserman says. "They’re easily kept and they live a long time."

This is hardly the first time pigeons have donned a uniform in the service of mankind. They carried messages across battle lines for the British forces during World War I, and Paul Julius Reuter, founder of the news agency of that name, used their carrier abilities to transmit stock information between Brussels and Aachen before the telegraph become reliably available.

"It’s great that unemployed pigeons from Trafalgar Square are being put to work," Gary Fuller, an air quality expert at King’s College London, told the Guardian. "Around 15 years ago tests were done on around 150 stray dogs in Mexico City, showing the ways in which air pollution was affecting lungs and heart health. But this is the first time that I’ve heard of urban wild animals being used to carry sensors.”

Although the ancients recognized their homing abilities – Ghengis Khan is thought to have pioneered pigeon messaging on the battlefield, and many traditional Middle Eastern cultures kept them – scientists have only recently begun to understand why the birds are able to navigate so effectively. 

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in 2012 used electrodes to study how pigeons responded to magnetic fields at the neuron level.  They found 53 separate neurons inside the pigeons' tiny brain stems that changed according to the magnetic field. They concluded that pigeons' "magnetically attuned nerve cells" translate the data to create "both an internal compass and an internal map." 

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White storks have stopped migrating from Europe to Africa for the winter, say researchers.

Instead, they remain in Spain and Portugal year-round, feasting on landfills' 'junk food.'

“Landfill sites provide abundant food resources that are reliable in both space and time, thus likely contributing to enabling individuals to remain in their breeding territory and on their nests year-round,” the team of British and Portuguese researchers explain in their study published Tuesday in the journal Movement Ecology. 

Because of the prolific, easily accessible food in landfills, Portugal’s stork population is now 10 times larger than it was 20 years ago. Not only has the overall number grown, but now the population of about 14,000 storks choose to stay year-round. 

“We found that the landfill sites enable year-round next use, which is an entirely new behavior that has developed very recently. This strategy enables the resident birds to select the best nest sites and to start breeding earlier,” lead researcher Aldina Franco, from the University of East Anglia’s School of Environmental Sciences in Norwich, England, said in a press release. 

And stay-at-home birds might have a breeding advantage because they are ready to go as soon as mating season begins, suspects Dr. Franco. 

“Having a nest close to a guaranteed food supply also means that the storks are less inclined to leave for the winter. They instead spend their non-breeding season defending their highly desirable nest locations.” 

But storks aren’t flocking to landfills because they are convenient – they actually seek out the discarded scraps of human food. Just because they are staying in Portugal and Spain for the landfills, doesn’t mean that they are building their nests near the dumps. 

Franco and her team of researchers placed GPS tracking devices on 48 birds. And after studying the location of these birds five times a day, Franco and her fellow researchers discovered that storks will travel up to 30 miles to visit a landfill during non-breeding season and up to 17 miles during the breeding season. 

“You see some individuals go from the nest to the landfill site and then just go back to the nest,” Franco told National Geographic. 

Along with a no-hassle food source, storks are also enjoying milder winters in Spain and Portugal. Thanks to climate change, their winter migration to Africa for temporal reasons is no longer necessary. Warmer European winters have also made the storks’ traditional food source, red swamp crayfish, more accessible. 

But storks’ reliance on junk food can’t last: under the new European Union Landfill Directives, all landfill sites with open-air trash piles will be closed by 2018. Portugal’s renovated will have new under cover locations for food waste, inaccessible to birds.

Iberian white storks addiction to artificial food sources needs to be further analyzed, say researchers, because landfill renovations could lead to subsequent population declines.

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The United States used to belong to passenger pigeons. The highly successful birds traversed the continent in flocks of hundreds of millions, impervious to predators from their sheer numbers alone.

Yet today no passenger pigeon lives. What happened in a span of just half a century?

As technological innovations brought European settlers deeper into North America in the mid-19th century, over-hunting and habitat destruction drove the birds to a swift extinction.

Check out these photos of the passenger pigeon's tragic demise — and a high-tech effort that just might bring them back.

The passenger pigeon's demise is a dark example of humanity's effect on the environment. How could such a numerous species be wiped out of existence within half a century?

They were so successful, they lived just about everywhere in North America and migrate in incredible numbers.

One flock that passed through southern Ontario in 1866 was estimated to include over 3.5 million pigeons. The cloud of birds blocked the sun and took 14 hours to pass.

Source: "Once There Were Billions" by Jerry Sullivan

If you mess with this bird's nest, it won't soon forget your face.

A new study from South Korean researchers found that brown skuas in Antarctica can recognize human "nest intruders" after only a few encounters.

We've seen this type of behavior before in birds, including crows and mockingbirds. But skua birds live thousands of miles away from any regular human settlements. This suggests that the skuas' behavior comes from sharp intelligence, rather than an advantageous wariness of people.

Researchers first suspected the birds' exceptional face recognition after weekly visits to their nests (to check on eggs and chicks and gather breeding data). As the scientists took more trips to the nests, the skuas — which can have a wingspan of more than five feet — were not only quicker to attack, but also attack farther and farther away from their nests.

They also found that, when approached by two humans who then separated (see video below), the skuas chose to attack the human who had visited their nest previously (a "nest intruder") and never followed the "neutral" human, who had not yet visited the nest:

"I had to defend myself against the skuas' attack," Yeong-Deok Han, one of the researchers, told Science Daily. "When I was with other researchers, the birds flew over me and tried to hit me. Even when I changed my field clothes, they followed me. The birds seemed to know me no matter what I [wore]."

The researchers all wore identical clothing when approaching the nests in pairs, so the skuas weren't relying on easy visual cues. The study suggests that, instead, the birds were going off facial features and body posture to distinguish between neutral humans and nest intruders.

Skuas are some of the most aggressive birds out there, which makes sense given their frozen wasteland of a habitat.

They're also partial kleptoparasites, which means a part of their diet comes from stealing other animals' kills. They've even been known to steal breast milk from nursing elephant seals.

The researchers believe that the intelligence needed for the brown skua's creative (and ruthless) scavenging also led to their nuanced human recognition.

Unless you're a polar researcher, you're not likely to cross paths with a brown skua. But if you do, watch how you behave — that bird will never forget you.

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City slicking birds may have major advantages over their country kin.

Birds who live in urban areas solve problems better than their rural counterparts and, surprisingly, have more robust immune systems, according to a new study published in the journal Behavioral Ecology.

The researchers, who work at McGill University's Bellairs Research Institute on Barbados, arrived at these conclusions by studying bullfinches on the tropical island.

Barbados' mix of urban and rural areas means the researchers could study birds that regularly mingle with humans in towns and cities, as well as birds living in remote areas.

Scientists already knew city and country birds of the same species use different survival behaviors, but this is the first time they've found clear cognitive differences between urban and rural populations.

The two groups of bullfinches were tested on their color discrimination, problem solving ability, boldness, and neophobia (the fear of the unknown). There was no difference in color discrimination and, surprisingly, city birds turned out to be more easily spooked than their rural brethren.

But the urban birds had the clear survival advantage. Finches in the city turned out to be both bolder and better at innovative problem solving, like getting access to a small jar of seeds:

The researchers assumed this extra brainpower had to come at a cost and suggested that city birds traded immune system strength for their problem solving.

The logic: Birds that live in rural areas are exposed to a greater diversity of irritants like bacteria and fungi, and as a result, their immune systems are often more robust. But in the case of the Barbados bullfinch, they found that the city finches' immunity was actually stronger than that of country finches.

It's not clear these results apply to other species of birds in other places, let alone other kinds of animals, but that could very well be the case.

"This was really surprising," researcher Jean-Nicolas Audet said in a video posted by the team. "It seems that in this case, at least, the urban birds have it all."

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The consumer adoption of 3D printing may be slow, but the technology is exploding in many other creative ways. It’s being used to create the fastest R/C cars in the world, to develop public housing complexes, and is even being deployed on the International Space Station. Now in another innovative application, the technology is being used to raise awareness about endangered and threatened birds.

3D printing marketplace Threeding and 3D scanner manufacturer Artec 3D are working together to scan and create 3D printing files for more than 55 species of endangered and threatened birds. The birds include the eastern imperial eagle, the white-tailed eagle, the boreal owl, the black-crowned night heron, the Humboldt penguin, the long-eared owl, and others. In this case, man is trying to save the birds that man’s activities are destroying. Many of these bird populations are facing extinction due to mostly man-made factors, such as habitat destruction, poaching for the exotic pets trade, and climate change, to name a few.

Using Artec’s Spider and Eva 3D scanners, a team of volunteers has been scanning taxidermied versions of the birds obtained from museums, scientific facilities, and other sources. The scans are then modified to create 3D printable files that are available for download for free from Threeding’s marketplace. The free versions will be available until the end of April, at which point Threeding will begin to charge a small fee for access to the files. Though offered to the public for a fee, students, universities, and other research organizations can ask for free access for educational and scientific purposes.

The team at Threeding and Artec 3D hope these files will raise awareness about these bird species and the dangers they face. “The preservation of all animal species is of critical importance and relies heavily upon education. The portability and ease afforded to users of our handheld scanners and software suite is offering a means for students, scientists, and conservationists alike to exchange information and work together in this effort, ” said Artec 3D president and CEO Artyom Yukhin.

Besides birds, Threeding is also involved in several other educational and scientific projects, including one that is preserving ancient Greek and Roman artifacts. Look for these and other models to arrive soon on the marketplace’s website.

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In the shady recesses of unassuming forest patches in eastern Brazil, bird species are taking their final bows on the global evolutionary stage, and winking out.

These are obscure birds with quaint names: Alagoas Foliage-Gleaner, Pernambuco Pygmy-Owl, Cryptic Treehunter. But their disappearance portends a turning point in a global biodiversity crisis.

Bird extinctions are nothing new. Human activity has already wiped out over a thousand species. But the vast majority of these occurred on oceanic islands.

Today, although island species remain disproportionately threatened, we are witnessing a historic shift towards the endangerment of continental species of birds. The Alagoas Foliage-Gleaner, last seen in 2011, looks increasingly like the tip of an iceberg.

This new wave of threats, driven primarily by habitat loss, is deeply troubling because South American forests are home to such a concentration of bird diversity, yet our conservation strategies are still a work in progress.

The trouble with the tropics

To appreciate the significance of today’s looming extinctions in the tropics, we must travel north to the great deciduous forests of the eastern United States, which are haunted by the ghosts of extinctions past. Here, the opportunity to experience the double raps of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, sun-obscuring clouds of Passenger Pigeons, raucous flocks of Carolina Parakeets, and the monotone song of the Bachman’s Warbler is seemingly forever lost.

The blame for these four infamous extinctions has been laid firmly at the door of historic deforestation.

In the early 20th century, the last remaining old-growth fell to the sawmills, almost without exception. Given the ubiquity of the logging, perhaps the most noteworthy feature of this extinction episode is that it did not involve more species.

The European experience was even more striking. The wholesale clearing of Europe’s primeval forest apparently did not cause a single bird extinction. The logical conclusion is that it is very difficult to drive continental birds extinct.

Why then are forest birds beginning to go extinct on mainland South America, home of the largest and most intact tropical forests on Earth?

We must face two equally unsettling conclusions. The first is that forest destruction, particularly in Brazil’s Atlantic rainforest, has reached continental-scale proportions, with almost no nook or cranny spared. And the second is that it may not be nearly as difficult to drive extinct in the tropics as in the temperate zone.

Biologists Stuart Pimm and Robert Askins have argued that the eastern USA witnessed few avian extinctions simply because most of its birds have very large geographic ranges. In South America, the situation is dramatically different.

South America is both the evolutionary cradle and current champion of global bird biodiversity; the authoritative regional list totals 3,368 species – around one third of all the word’s birds. Many of these species have small ranges, restricted to particular countries or even to particular mountains or forest types.

Unique features of the life history of tropical birds led to an overly rosy assessment of their future. Author and academic Bjorn Lomborg, for example, claimed that the lack of extinctions following the destruction of Brazil’s Atlantic forest showed that the biodiversity crisis is overblown.

But extinctions may lag far behind forest loss, a phenomenon known as the “extinction debt” which may be paid over hundreds of years.

Tropical birds typically live for longer than their temperate counterparts. Thus, the last pairs of rare species may make their last stand in their fragmented forest redoubts for decades. Indeed, several species have paid this price, and more may already be committed to extinction.

Need to develop strategies

The situation in northeast Brazil is particularly dire.

A few dozen Alagoas Antwrens cling to survival in less than six tiny forest patches. The Alagoas Foliage-gleaner, presented to science along with the Antwren for the first time in the 1980s, was known from only two patches. The last known individual was photographed for the final timein November 2011. We can only guess how many more species will be lost from this region where new species are discovered and others are disappearing on a near-annual basis.

But what of Amazonia, the last great tropical forest wilderness and bastion of tropical biodiversity?

Although deforestation rates have fallen since 2004, there are still grounds for concern. Pressure on existing protected areas from dam-building and mining interests is increasing, and the existing reserve network poorly protects the hardest hit regions.

Furthermore, Amazonia is divided into different biogeographic regions known as ‘areas of endemism’ that each contain species found nowhere else. Even today, taxonomists continue to recognize new divisions in Amazonian birds, often elevating former subspecies to species status. The Belem Curassow was recently recognized as a species and occurs only in the most deforested part of the Amazon. The last documented record in the wild was over 35 years ago.

Unless a population is discovered in the embattled Gurupi reserve, this species may be the first recorded Amazonian bird extinction. Hot on its heels is the Iquitos Gnatcatcher, known only from a tiny and heavily deforested area of unique stunted forest in Peru. Only six pairs are known, and the bird has proven harder to find every year.

Some of these species need immediate and drastic conservation interventions, but their plight seems to be largely ignored by governments and international environmental groups. Restoring forest around these last fragments is crucial for long-term population viability.

However, for some species captive breeding with an eye to future reintroduction may be the only way forward. Such measures have already saved the Spix’s Macaw and Alagoas Curassow from global extinction – populations of these species exist only in captivity. However, while we have centuries of experience breeding parrots and gamebirds, we know far less about breeding small songbirds.

In fact, most of what we know about managing songbird populations comes from islands, and it is unclear how well this knowledge will translate to the mainland. Island species are adapted to maintain small populations and may be better able to recover from genetic bottlenecks. And, quick fixes such as controlling invasive predators have helped to restore populations. But mainland birds face a different suite of threats, dominated by habitat loss.

Clearly, we must not assume that tropical forest birds will prove as resilient to human activity as their temperate brethren. But though the situation is critical, we also see grounds for optimism.

In Peru, for instance, new endangered species legislation has convened a working group to develop a conservation strategy for the Iquitos Gnatcatcher. In the meantime, a small reserve has been created that protects the few remaining territories. Across the border in Brazil exciting plans are being drawn up to reintroduce the Alagoas Curassow back into the wild.

There is an immediate need to support and expand such actions. The next five to ten years will be critical for many species of South American birds teetering on the brink of extinction.

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Sótano de las Golondrinas, or Cave of Swallows, is the largest pit cave in the world — an over 1,200-foot drop from top to bottom.

It's also home to thousands of birds, who spiral out of the cave's mouth each day at sunrise, a sight that is popular with tourists. The cave is also a hot spot for adventure-seekers, who BASE jump or rappel down the cave's walls. 

Written by Chloe Miller and produced by Chelsea Pineda

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For the first time ever, scientists have looked at all 1,154 birds native to North America to see just how much trouble they're in — and the results aren't very reassuring.

The new report, compiled by the North American Bird Conservation Initiative, examined each bird's population size, range, and the threats it faces. It pulled all of these factors into a total score.

Overall, the group concluded that 37% of North (and Central) American birds are in need of "urgent conservation action."

Ocean and tropical forest birds are particularly at risk.

Scroll through to see a small sampling of what we might lose — the scientists gave all of these species a ranking of high conservation concern, which means if we don't act soon, their populations could dwindle to nothing.

Yellow-headed parrot

The yellow-headed parrot lives in Mexico and northern Central America, where it has a reputation for munching on corn growing in fields. They're particularly in trouble because of people capturing them to sell as pets.

Pink-headed warbler

Found in western Guatemala, the pink-headed warbler likes to live in high-altitude forests, but a large volcanic eruption in 1982 destroyed many of its favorite spots.

California condor

The California condor is one of the biggest success stories in species recovery. Only 22 of these vultures remained in the 1980s; a careful captive breeding program means there are now 235 birds living in the wild. But they still die from eating animals killed with lead bullets and from flying into electrical wires.

Sometimes you go a little too far for a snack.

That's what happened to a seagull that was scavenging in the garbage cans of a food factory in Wales. The unsuspecting bird fell into a thrown-away vat of chicken tikka masala, which dyed it completely orange.

The pungent seagull was taken to Vale Animal Hospital in nearby Gloucestershire, where he was cleaned up and fed, according to the Guardian. The bird was uninjured.

According to veterinary nurse Lucy Kells, he smelled so good he made the staff hungry. 

Commenters on Facebook were quick to make a comparison to another big, colorful bird: Big Bird.

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NASA and farmers are teaming up to save bird lives. NASA satellites track the birds' migration and alert farmers, who then flood their fields to generate temporary wetlands for the birds to rest and refuel.

Video courtesy of NASA

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We've all been there: staring past a sign saying "Do Not Enter" into the very place you want to go. You make a snap calculation — what will happen if you ignore the sign? How likely you are to get caught? Is anyone around? Maybe you go for it.

But that sort of impulse is a huge headache for people trying to protect animals that just want to be left alone. The solution may involve tapping into that itchy feeling you get at the back of your neck when you think you're being watched, suggests a paper recently published in BioOne.

Fort de Soto, Florida, is one of the most popular beaches in the U.S., with almost 3 million visitors a year. But it's also home to a handful of species of endangered birds, like American oystercatchers and snowy plovers. So part of the beach is roped off. Fences don't work because there are sea turtles in the area that need to be able to come and go freely.

So Elizabeth Forys, an ecologist at Eckerd College in Florida, wanted to know if the less substantial barriers and signs were really working. To find out, she set up a camera on the site and watched beach traffic for three months. Then she added a sign, pointing out in English and Spanish that the area was under surveillance.

In general, she was pleasantly surprised. "Most of the time no one was in there," Forys told Tech Insider, "so most of the time people were compliant." There were people in roped off areas less than 10% of the time before the sign was installed, and that plummeted to less than 1% after the surveillance was signposted.

While being watched at the beach sounds a little sordid, this sort of project may avoid serious privacy issues, according to Jay Stanley of the American Civil Liberties Union's technology project. Because the surveillance is at such a limited scale, this sort of use "doesn't raise the concerns we generally have," he said. "Video surveillance is a tool, and like any tool it has good and bad uses," he adds.

Forys wants to repeat the experiment in other places, but even if she gets similar results, this won't be a silver bullet for environmentalists. The camera was surprisingly difficult to set up someplace so remote, she said, since it needed both electricity and internet. (She says other ecologists are considering just putting up signs and skipping the cameras all together to see if the effect holds.) And Forys thinks the signs need to be freshly maintained to retain their impact.

"Signage is as old as protected areas," said Jim Barborak of Colorado State University's Center for Protected Areas Management, who notes that these signs can be bad for parks' images, since they so often include the word NO. "In general, I think their findings are right on and what I would expect," he adds.

He points out that the larger a roped off area is, the harder it is to keep people out — so another security option is always appealing.

SEE ALSO: The 24 ways we're tracked on a regular basis reveal something disturbing about the future

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It's a beautiful day in ancient Burma. The sun warms the earth under your birdlike dinosaur feet. You scratch a bit at the ground with the sharp little claws that still protrude from your transitional dinosaur-bird wings. You're still young, a fledgling, and it feels great to wander around a bit.

Then something catches your attention — maybe a predator. You turn and move, not paying close attention to where you're going. And then splat. Your wing sticks deep into a pile of tree resin. You're tiny, standing just several inches high, and not strong enough to pull yourself free. Yet you're still alive, terrified. You squirm, leaving scratch marks in the hard, sucking sap. But you can't pull yourself free. So that's where you die. Maybe it happens fast, as some larger creature takes advantage of your mistake for a quick snack. Or maybe it's a slow death by exhaustion.

Ninety-nine million years later only your wing remains.

Some version of that scene — we don't know the details — likely played out for some young enantiornithes. Enantiornithes are a kind of transitional birdlike dinosaur. An amazing paper published Tuesday examines two baby dinosaur wings found trapped in amber with their feathers, and skin still attached. And its most interesting detail is that one of the two creatures was still alive when it got trapped, and seems to have scratched at the goop as it died.

Amber is fossilized tree sap, which can preserve biomass much better than common fossils. That's incredibly useful for researchers, because it means nearly-complete dino wings can travel 99 million years through time for their examination. But for some poor little baby dino-bird, it meant catching its wing in some sticky goop that held it fast, squirming and scratching until it died.

Kind of a dark little nugget to stick in a science paper, but it offers a rare glimpse into a 99-million-year old moment of high drama. It makes you realize that all these old bones we're used to seeing in museums represent real living things that roamed the planet and lived full lives of their own, before passing their bodies into posterity.

The signs of this young dinosaur's squirmings are hard to see with the naked eye. But the researchers who studied the well-preserved dinosaur wings found "bidirectional claw marks" in the amber, along with other evidence that this creature was still moving when it died. The photo labeled "k" in the image above shows some of these marks, with the yellow arrows indicating the direction the claws moved.

Poor little 99-million-year-old dino-bird. Thanks for unwittingly donating your body to science.

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Scientists just published their findings from two 99 million-year-old baby dinosaur wings — with feathers still attached — found encased in amber. I'm going to repeat that: We've got two dinosaur wings so well-preserved in amber that scientists can study their feathers.

No, you aren't living in the first ten minutes of an unpublished "Jurassic Park" sequel.

The wings seem to come from enantiornithes, a group of transitional dinosaurs with teeth and claws on their wings but that otherwise resembled modern birds. The wings got trapped in tree sap, which — as it turned to amber — encased them and preserved them more effectively than the more common fossilization process would have.

The amber in which the wings were found comes from Myanmar (Burma) and was originally prepared as jewelry, reports Kristin Romey for National Geographic. (National Geographic helped fund the project that uncovered the wings.)

In their paper revealing their findings, the researchers "tentatively" suggest that the two wings come from the same species of enantiornithes. And they're so well-preserved that they show how similar the feathering is to that of modern birds.

Modern birds are understood to be the last surviving dinosaurs, so any glimpse at how they emerged is fascinating.

Preserved coloring in the feathers reveals layers of brown and white feathers in one of the wings, in patterns similar to those we still see today. In fact, almost everything the researchers examined from the skin and muscle to the microstructures of the individual feathers resembles the wing structure of today's avians.

These findings are special because it's incredibly rare to find fossils this old and well-preserved. In normal fossilization processes, feathers tend to disappear, leaving behind only difficult-to-interpret impressions on surrounding rock. And when feathers do turn up in amber, it's usually alone and without much context. These wings though are astonishingly complete.

One more amazing fact from the paper: It looks like the ancient dino-bird baby might have still been alive when it got buried in the tree sap. Preserved claw marks around the wings suggest some kind of struggle happened before the sap hardened.

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NOW WATCH: This is how big dinosaurs actually were in real life

Miners in Southeast Asia discovered a well-preserved wing of an extinct bird species. The discovery reveals similarities between ancient and modern birds. 

Produced by Noah Friedman. Original reporting by Jessica Orwig.

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It’s 65 million years ago. You’re taking a relaxing stroll through the forest, when in the distance, you hear thunderous stomping.

You’ve seen enough Jurassic Park movies to know it’s time to run, but the stomping is still getting louder and louder.

As you sprint frantically through the forest, you turn to look over your shoulder. A T. Rex emerges from the trees and lets out a ferocious ... coo.

At least, that’s what a new study that will be published next month in the journal Evolution found. According to the study, large-bodied dinosaurs, like the T. Rex, did not communicate in roars, but in slightly less intimidating coos and mumbles.

The researchers came to these results by examining the closest things to a living dinosaur we’ve got: archosaurs (birds and crocodiles). They examined the origin and the evolution of the archosaur vocal organ and the enormous repertoire of sounds that it can produce. Then, they compared this to vocal data collected about dinosaurs.

They found that birds have a special way of emitting sound, called closed-mouth vocalization. This sound is produced through the skin in a bird’s neck while its beak is closed.

"Looking at the distribution of closed-mouth vocalization in birds that are alive today could tell us how dinosaurs vocalized," Chad Eliason, the study's co-author, said in a press release.

What was interesting was that only animals with a larger body size (the size of a dove or larger) used this closed-mouth vocalization. Tobias Riede, lead author of the study, said the association with large bodies has to do with physics.

"The inflation of an elastic cavity could present a size-dependent challenge," Riede said in the press release. "The lung pressure required to inflate a cavity depends on the tension in the wall of the cavity, and this tension increases for smaller body sizes."

These closed-mouth vocalizations, the researchers found, emerged in “diverse archosaur species depending on behavioral or environmental circumstances.”

Although it’s hard to reconstruct the sounds of the long-extinct dinosaurs (their fleshy vocal organs don’t fossilize the way their bones do), the researchers had a few other hints to suggest that dinosaurs produced this type of sound.

Based on what scientists know about birds, dinosaurs likely did not have vocal cords, those “tough membranes that vibrate when a lion roars or a human speaks,” the Washington Post reports. Instead, they had air sacs, and possibly even a birdlike syrinx, too.

"To make any kind of sense of what nonavian dinosaurs sounded like, we need to understand how living birds vocalize," Julia Clarke, co-author of the study, said in the press release. "This makes for a very different Jurassic world. Not only were dinosaurs feathered, but they may have had bulging necks and made booming, closed-mouth sounds."

SEE ALSO: Scientists discovered two feather-covered dinosaur wings preserved in amber

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Scientists have been able to observe birds falling asleep mid-flight for the first time — an ability that's long been suspected but never been proven.

But even though researchers had thought this might be the case, the new research shows that the way birds nap in the air is much stranger than we ever expected.

The discovery can finally help explain how birds can fly for days and weeks at a time without ever coming in to land — something that's divided the biology community for decades.

That's because, without knowing what goes on in the sky, scientists weren't sure whether birds were staying awake through their journeys, or just resting one hemisphere of their brain at a time — something that ducks have already been observed doing on land to avoid predators.

The new research found both the expected and the unexpected. By measuring the brain activity of frigatebirds— seabirds known to fly for weeks at a time over the ocean in search of fish — researchers showed once and for all that birds can shut down one hemisphere at a time during flight, as expected.

But they can also rest both hemispheres at once — something scientists didn't expect them to be able to do while remaining airborne.

To figure this out, a team from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany developed a small device that was able to measure electroencephalographic (EEG) changes in birds' brain activity.

This device, which they called the "flight data recorder" was able to detect both slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, and they attached it to 15 adult female frigatebirds.

The team recorded their brain activity over 10 days and more than 3,000 kilometres of flight, while a GPS device also tracked the birds' position and altitude.

After the birds had landed and had some time to recover, the researchers collected the flight data recorders to analyse the recordings — and were surprised by what they found.

During the day, the birds would stay awake and actively search for fish. But as the sun set, the birds switched into slow wave sleep for several minutes at a time while they continued to fly over the water.

More often than not, the birds just rested one hemisphere at a time, which is something the researchers had expected. In addition to ducks, we know dolphins are able to continue swimming while they sleep by leaving one hemisphere on the lookout for danger. Humans also do this when we fall asleep in a new location.

When frigatebirds showed this behaviour, the recording devices revealed that they were usually circling on rising air currents, and they only kept the hemisphere connected to the eye that was facing the direction of the turn awake. This suggests that they were looking where they were going while napping.

"The frigatebirds may be keeping an eye out for other birds to prevent collisions much like ducks keep an eye out for predators,"said lead researcher Niels Rattenborg.

But the EEG recordings also showed both hemispheres going into slow wave sleep at the same time, which unexpectedly suggested that birds were able to maintain aerodynamic control even when their entire brain is asleep.

On rare occasions, the birds even went into brief periods of REM sleep while they remained airborne — something that sounds pretty weird, seeing as the state is associated with total muscle relaxation in most mammals.

But in birds, REM sleep only lasted several seconds during flight, and the only noticeable muscle relaxation was a slight droop of the head.

The results back on land showed that the birds were even able to stand on one leg during this state.

This was all fascinating, but perhaps the biggest surprise was the fact that, despite this unique ability, frigatebirds slept less than an hour a day, or 42 minutes on average, to be precise — less than 10 percent of the time they normally spend sleeping on land.

This suggests there's an evolutionary trade-off to taking a nap on the wing — so, perhaps birds are more likely to have collisions or miss out on food while sleeping — but more research needs to be done to figure out what's really going on.

"Why they sleep so little in flight, even at night when they rarely forage, remains unclear,"said Rattenborg.

More investigation is also needed into how the birds function on such little sleep — something that would be disastrous for humans.

"Why we, and many other animals, suffer dramatically from sleep loss whereas some birds are able to perform adaptively on far less sleep remains a mystery," Rattenborg added.

So while the new study answers one question — how birds stay airborne for weeks at a time without taking a break — it's now opened up several more... which is what's so great about science. Our work is never done.

We can't wait to see what they find next.

The research has been published in Nature Communications.

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The Bionic Bird is a drone designed to look and fly just like a real bird. The drone can fly up to 12 miles per hour for 10 minutes at a time. 

Video courtesy of mybionicbird.com.

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