Dinofeathers

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It's astonishing the stuff you can find, once you start looking for it.  It was only a few years ago that the first feathered dinosaur fossils -- other than Archaeopteryx, of course -- were found.  I remember that clearly, because I was researching my dinosaur novel Bones of the Earth when the fossils first came out of China.  Now Ryan C. McKellar, Brian D. E. Chatterton, Alexander P. Wolfe, and (one almost adds “of course”) Philip J. Currie have published a paper in Science stating that they have found an assemblage of dino and bird feathers in Canadian late Cretaceous amber.

That leaves us a long, long way from the late Michael Crichton's dream of resurrecting dinosaurs from their DNA and then letting them escape into the suburbs where they can eat our children, of course.  But it's a start.

You can read the paper's abstract here.  Or you can read a good summary article (with lots of pix!) here.


And I'm back in print again . . .

Or, rather, still in print but in a different format.  Anyway, I just received a copy of the trade paperback of The Dragons of Babel in the mail.  Even in the cheap scan to the right, it looks good.  That's because of the Stephen Martiniere cover.

Note also that they put the blurb from Michael Moorcock on the front.  That's the guy who wrote Gloriana, the Dancers at the End of Time trilogy and the Elric books.  To say nothing of his work as editor of New Worlds or . . . well, if you get me started, we'll be here all day.  In brief, he's a man whose good opinion is worth having.  So you can imagine how happy I am to have it.

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