About 80 million years ago, the flap of wings in a conifer forest let loose feathers that floated through the air before sticking to globs of shining tree sap.
Researchers in Western Canada have discovered these slicks of solidified sap, known as amber, contain a great variety of dinosaur and bird feathers from the Late Cretaceous period.
They found 11 sets of feathers after screening more than 4,000 amber deposits in different museum collections. The feathers were so well-preserved that the researchers were even able to guess at what colors they might have been. They also contained samples of each of the four stages of feather evolution.
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