|The new theropod photographed under UV light. (c) Helmut Tischlinger.|
|Skin remains and filaments preserved dorsal to the tail base. (c) Helmut Tischlinger.|
Though a number of primitive characters were obvious from the beginning, when we first started working on this fossil, we were impressed by the overall similarity with Juravenator, which is of exactly the same age and comes from an adjacent basin, especially in the proportions. It took Christian and me three trips to Eichstätt to look at the original specimen of this taxon to make sure that it is not just another specimen or species of Juravenator. Thanks are due here to the director of the Jura Museum, Dr. Martina Kölbl-Ebert, who gave us access to Juravenator, even though we couldn't tell her why we needed to see it, since the existence of Sciurumimus was still a well hidden secret.
Our further resarch showed that Sciurumimus is not only clearly distinct from Juravenator, but that it is actually considerably more basal in the theropod family tree than other feathered dinosaurs known, being related to megalosaurids, large, predatory dinosaurs, such as the Middle Jurassic Megalosaurus. Thus, it it was not particularily closely related to birds, yet its entire body seems to have been covered in thin, hair-like filaments. It thus indicates that feathers might have been much more widely spread among dinosaurs than previously recognized. Surely, this is not an entirely new idea, but it is always nice to see your hypothesis confirmed by hard evidence...
|Life reconstruction of the fluffy juvenile of Sciurumimus. I wonder if adults would have been as fluffy...|
The function of these feathers was certainly not flight, but most probably thermoregulation. These structures resemble the down feathers of modern birds, which are great to keep your body warm (as anybody knows who has used a down jacket). This in term indicates that these dinosaurs probably had some kind of mechanism to actively regulat their own body temperature.
Much has been written in the media about the significance of this find, so I don't want to dwell too much on this here, and more information will become available with a detailed description that we are currently working on. In the meantime, Sciurumimus has found a comfortable home as a permanent loan to the Bürgermeister Müller Museum in Solnhofen, the very town whose name is world famous because of the well-preserved fossils in this area. There, the original fossil can be admired by everyone who visits the beautiful valley of the Altmühl, formerly the tropical archipelago of Solnhofen...