There’s no great purpose to this post, but it will become a little more relevant tomorrow with the follow-up so I thought it sensible to stick this in now. I have covered Sinornithosaurus a couple of times on here before since, well, it’s a great fossil (search the archives for various posts that mention it including a few photos). I do have these close-ups of the manus (above) and pes (below) so it seemed a waste not to use them in context.
While obviously the preservation of material like this means the bones are rather flat, it’s worth remembering that not all flat fossils are the same. You can get nice looking, but basically crushed specimens like the Microraptor gui holotype, of those where the bones split between slabs making a real mess like the second Anchiornis, or things like this which while compressed are not in 2D but have a lot of the shape of the bones retained as well as preserving soft tissues. No it’s not 3D, but there’s rather more detail in there than might be expected and it’s not the mess you might initially expect.
This will become more relevant shortly, stay tuned.
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