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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwaiver is Regina Barbara here. I'm going to start

today's episode with a question. When I say dinosaur, what do you picture in your head?

Maybe a stegosaurus, like a chunky guy with diamond-shaped plates and a ridge along its

back, or triceratops with like huge horns, kind of like a rhinoceros, but like a little kid

had drawn it. Or T-Rex, classic, big body, big teeth, tiny little arms.

But what you might not think of are feathers.

It turns out many dinosaurs did have feathers.

We found that out in the mid-90s when dinosaur fossils were discovered at the bottom of a lake

in China.

In lakes, you have no scavengers and you have guaranteed burial.

And so this leads to really exceptional preservation.

And these fossils from China, the most common soft tissue they preserve are feathers.

This is Jing Mei O'Connor.

She's a dinosaur paleobiologist and the associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum of Chicago.

And she says that the structure of a feather is mostly keratin, which is a protein that usually breaks down over time.

But when feathers have pigment-bearing mono-organelles called melanosomes, they're in our

eyes, they're in the ink sats of squid, they're everywhere, right? So these organelles are extremely

...