Dino feathers may have had earlier origin than thought
Hairlike filaments found on 'wrong' side of dino family tree
By Sid Perkins
Filaments preserved in newly described fossils hint that feathers, one hallmark of modern-day birds, may have originated from structures present on some of the earliest dinosaur species.
The fossil record indicates that feathers, besides covering all of today’s birds, also graced many an ancient dinosaur, says Hai-Lu You, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences in Beijing. Many research teams have found a variety of simpler structures — including peculiar, branched structures that paleontologists often call “dinofuzz,” as well as single unbranched filaments — on other fossils, he notes. Previously, though, all of those fine-scale body structures have been found on theropod dinosaurs (a group of largely carnivorous bipedal creatures) and their relatives in the saurichian, or lizard-hipped, side of the dinosaur family tree.
Now, in the March 19 Nature, You and his colleagues describe the fossils of an ornithischian, or bird-hipped, dinosaur that apparently sported filamentary structures on several parts of its body. The newly described creature, Tianyulong confuciusi, lived between 120 million and 130 million years ago in what is now northeastern China.