Feathers Preserved in Dinosaur Coprolite Offer Clues to Bird Survival

Sixty-six million years ago, in the final chapter of the dinosaur age, a tyrannosaur consumed a bird — and what passed through that predator became stone, preserving feathers in extraordinary detail inside fossilized feces. This rare coprolite, recovered and studied by paleontologists, offers direct evidence of predator-prey relationships at the very edge of the Cretaceous extinction, when an asteroid was about to silence all non-avian dinosaurs while leaving birds — their closest kin — to inherit the world. In the accident of geological preservation, science finds a window into one of life's