At 3:00 a.m. on September 30th, Ryan Carney, a paleontologist and epidemiologist at the University of South Florida, was in a celebratory mood. It was the 159th anniversary of the first paper published on feathers from Archaeopteryx, a Jurassic-era dinosaur. When paleontologists first unearthed an Archaeopteryx in 1861, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species was just two years old. The fossil ended up pushing forward evolutionary theory at the time, showing that a bird-like dinosaur was flitting about millions of years before the existence of T. rex. More than a…
