Feathers Arose 100 Million Years Before Birds

| June 4, 2019 | Biology | No Comments

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – Feathers arose 100 million years before birds—changing how we look at dinosaurs, birds, and pterosaurs, the flying reptiles, a new research suggests.

Earlier this year, researchers discovered that if the pterosaurs really carried feathers, then it means these structures arose deep in the evolutionary tree, much deeper than at the point when birds originated.

1 / 1Reconstruction of the studied pterosaur, with four different feather types over its head, neck, body, and wings, and a generally ginger-brown colour Credit: Reconstruction by Yuan Zhang.

Reconstruction of the studied pterosaur, with four different feather types over its head, neck, body, and wings, and a generally ginger-brown colour Credit: Reconstruction by Yuan Zhang.

“The oldest bird is still Archaeopteryx first found in the Late Jurassic of southern Germany in 1861, although some species from China are a little older,” lead author, Professor Mike Benton, from the University of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, said in a press release.

“Those fossils all show a diversity of feathers—down feathers over the body and long, vaned feathers on the wings. But, since 1994, palaeontologists have been contending with the perturbing discovery, based on hundreds of amazing specimens from China, that many dinosaurs also had feathers.”

According to co-author, Baoyu Jiang from the University of Nanjing,  at first, the dinosaurs with feathers were close to the origin of birds in the evolutionary tree.

See also:

New Discovery Pushes Origin Of Feathers Back By 70 Million Years

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“This was not so hard to believe. So, the origin of feathers was pushed back at least to the origin of those bird-like dinosaurs, maybe 200 million years ago.”

The breakthrough came when researchers studied two new pterosaurs from China, and we saw that many of their whiskers were branched. We expected single strands—monofilaments—but what we saw were tufts and down feathers. Pterosaurs had feathers,” Baoyu Jiang explained.

Professor Benton added: “This drives the origin of feathers back to 250 million years ago at least – the point of origin of pterosaurs, dinosaurs and their relatives. The Early Triassic world then was recovering from the most devastating mass extinction ever, and life on land had come back from near-total wipe-out.

“Palaeontologists had already noted that the new reptiles walked upright instead of sprawling, that their bone structure suggested fast growth and maybe even warm-bloodedness, and the mammal ancestors probably had hair by then.

“So, the dinosaurs, pterosaurs and their ancestors had feathers too. Feathers then probably arose to aid this speeding up of physiology and ecology, purely for insulation. The other functions of feathers, for display and of course for flight, came much later.”

Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff Writer

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