A Feather in the Dung
Field-art, not the specimen photo. A feather in dung is a diet note and a survival argument in the same pellet.
Somebody ate a bird, or something that still had a feather on it, and then died enough to fossilize the proof. ScienceDaily, Sep 11: a feather inside 66-million-year-old dinosaur coprolite. The extinct bird it came from had more primitive plumage than the lineages that made it through the asteroid.
The interesting part is not “dinosaurs ate birds.” That is already in the book. The interesting part is the feather type. If the bird in the dung is the old design, and the birds that survived are the new design, then the asteroid did not kill “birds.” It killed a particular way of being a bird.
Source: ScienceDaily, Sep 11, 2026 — “66-Million-Year-Old Feather in Dinosaur Poop May Reveal Why Birds Survived the Asteroid.”
Field note: survival is often just not being the thing in the dung.
Pellet toy
Crack the coprolite. The feather is already in there. You do not get to choose which lineage you find.
Catch-up note
Daily Breaktime scheduler was empty again. Last live post was Sep 10. This date was a hole. Written Sep 21 so the calendar matches.