Feathers

WASHINGTON - The Department of Justice announced a new policy broadening and clarifying the right of Native Americans to possess eagle feathers and other parts of the birds that they consider sacred but are protected by U.S. law. Federal wildlife laws prohibit the killing of eagles and the possession and commercialization of their feathers. While certain members of Indian tribes have been exempted, the wildlife laws have been a source of confusion among some tribes that feared prosecution for carrying out their customs and traditions.

Two fossil dinosaur specimens from China have revealed the animals' last meal: feathered, flying dinosaurs, along with fish, a lizard and the remains of unidentified mammals. The dinos might have been scavengers, but the near-complete remains of two of the flying dinosaurs in one of the animal's stomachs suggests instead that the beast was a skillful predator, said paleontologist Philip R. Bell of the Pipestone Creek Dinosaur Initiative in Clairmont, Canada, lead author of a report appearing in the online journal PLoS One. [ For the record, 9:34 a.m. Sept.

After the coffee. Before flying to Russia to join the Pussy Riot protests. The Skinny: This was a long week and yet I can't remember one thing about it. Isn't aging wonderful? Friday's headlines include profiles of Marvel chief Ike Perlmutter, previews of the weekend box office and a chat with Robert Pattinson (I'm trying to score more young female readers). Daily Dose: Mark Easton, the deputy general counsel atWarner Bros., is exiting the studio after just over a year there to return to O'Melveny & Myers as a partner specializing in sports and media as well as mergers and acquisitions.

A 135-million-year-old fossil of a juvenile dinosaur found in Bavaria suggests that most carnivorous dinosaurs may have been covered in feathers. Paleontologists had already known that many dinosaurs closely related to birds were covered in feathers, but the newly discovered one is from a different family and occurs much earlier in the dinosaur evolutionary tree. Because of the early appearance of feathers, the find indicates "that all predatory dinosaurs had feathers," said paleontologist Oliver Rauhut of the Bayerische Staatssammlung fur Palaontologie und Geologie in Munich, who led the team.

If you want to eat foie gras in California before July 1, especially at a feast dedicated to the smooth, super-fatted duck liver, your pâté may be seasoned with a grain or two of political theater. Outside Santa Monica's Mélisse earlier this month, there were news trucks, a cordon of friendly police officers, protesters waving crumpled posters showing unhappy waterfowl and rumpled counter-protesters with their own propaganda fliers, dancing around the periphery like boxers waiting to get into the ring.

At dress shops across Los Angeles, mother-and-daughter pairs dressed in jeans and high school sweat shirts that read "Seniors 2012" are on a mission. It's officially springtime, and for many a young woman in high school, that can mean only one thing: prom season has arrived. The hunt for just the right dress can be a challenge. The little black dress may be the suitable go-to for almost every other occasion, but for prom, a simple black dress won't do. The perfect prom dress has to dazzle in pictures, make the wearer feel like a princess and hold up to a full night on the dance floor.

When it comes to dino outerwear, shag might be the new scales. Fossil evidence from a trio of 125-million-year-old dinosaurs that were relatives of Tyrannosaurus rex indicates the giant creatures wore primitive feathers. The three tyrannosauroids -- one adult and two juveniles -- belong to a newly described species discovered in northeastern China. The full-grown Yutyrannus huali weighed 3,000 pounds and stretched about 30 feet from nose to tail. The younger ones were still impressive at about 1,100 and 1,300 pounds.

For me, Thanksgiving is inevitably too much, too rich, too frenzied. Even when there were only four of us, my mother used to get up at 5:30 on Thanksgiving morning to start cooking, huffing and puffing all the way, 'til my father revved up his electric carving knife and dinner was served. We ate quickly, and just when I thought we could maybe relax and digest, maybe take a snooze, she'd clap her hands and command: Dishes! That's maybe why as an adult I rebelled against the holiday, sometimes opting out entirely and staying in to read.

Although — or perhaps because — he ruffled so many feathers when he hosted the Golden Globes in January, comedian Ricky Gervais will return to the podium at the annual awards gala in 2012, the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. announced Wednesday. The group, composed of 83 entertainment journalists from around the world, voted Wednesday to bring back the performer for a third consecutive year, though a small but vocal minority dissented. Sixteen out of the 62 members who voted were opposed to Gervais' return, according to a person who was present at the meeting but asked not to be identified because of the confidential nature of the proceedings.

A trove of prehistoric feathers both primitive and complex is providing scientists with a snapshot of the diversity of down-covered dinosaurs and birds during the late Cretaceous. An account published in Friday's edition of the journal Science describes a host of feathers and feather-like filaments found ensconced in 70-million-year-old amber from western Canada. The structures reveal what the precursors of modern feathers really looked like. "The simplest feathers are of greatest interest because these protofeathers have been inferred to be the evolutionary precedent to evolved feathers," said study coauthor Alexander Wolfe, a paleoecologist at the University of Alberta in Canada.