![]() ![]() The leading dinosaur expert of the time, Richard Owen, disagreed, claiming Archaeopteryx as the first bird outside dinosaur lineage. In 1868 he published On the Animals which are Most Nearly Intermediate between Birds and Reptiles, making the case. He cited skeletal similarities, particularly among some saurischian dinosaurs, fossils of the 'first bird' Archaeopteryx and modern birds. Shortly after the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, British biologist and evolution-defender Thomas Henry Huxley proposed that birds were descendants of dinosaurs. 4 Taxonomy and the inference of feathers in other dinosaurs.3.1 List of dinosaur genera preserved with feathers.The Koonwarra Fossil Bed holds hints at what they might have eaten: it’s also full of fossilized fish. Because the majority of feathers weren’t fit for flight, they may have belonged to small, flightless carnivores from the dromaeosaur group. ![]() The largest feather was just over half an inch long, and the smallest-which resembles bird hatchlings’ down feathers-was under a quarter inch in length. “The report provides a really important snapshot of early Cretaceous polar plumage.” “It makes perfect sense that these feathers would have helped to keep dinosaurs and primitive birds warm at high latitudes during the Cretaceous,” Ryan McKellar, fossil feather expert who an author of the paper, tells National Geographic. And even though the feathers may not have been used to fly, they were probably used for warmth. The feathers were probably dark colored, which was unexpected in a polar region and might mean that the animals changed colors with seasons, reports Pickrell. They weren’t near any skeletal fossils, and probably fell into the Koonwarra Lake while the creature was molting. The fossil finds also included a proto-feather, which lacks those barbs, making it more hair-like and fluffy. True feathers have veins that are practically zippered together by barb-like structures, which is why it takes some force to push them apart. Only one of the feathers resemble the type that modern birds use for flight. The researchers analyzed feathers for morphological and chemical data, according to an Uppsala University statement. Even still, they would have needed to survive long periods of cold and darkness in winter, according to a pre-print paper in review for the journal Gondwana Research. However, the dinosaurs and ancient birds living at that time wouldn’t have faced the same extreme weather that the South Pole experiences today. The discovery “shows for the first time that a diverse array of feathered dinosaurs and flight-capable primitive birds inhabited the ancient polar regions.”Ībout 118 million years ago, Australia was a part of the southernmost land mass with Antarctica. “Fossils feathers have never been found in polar settings before,” lead author and paleontologist Benjamin Kear of Uppsala University in Sweden tells John Pickrell at National Geographic. Initially, scientists took them as evidence of ancient birds, but detailed analysis was not done until now. The ten new fossilized feathers were first found in the 1960s during road construction on a hill near the Koonwarra Fossil Bed in southeastern Australia. Finding fossilized feathers is rare because soft tissues only stand the test of time in highly specific circumstances, which is partly why the new find is so exciting. ![]() Definitely not all of them had feathers, Tyrannosaurus rex was probably at least a little scaly, but some certainly had gorgeous, occasionally colorful plumage. The conversation about which dinosaurs had feathers, which had scales or which had a mix of both is complicated. Now, researchers have identified the first fossil evidence that dinosaurs donned feather coats to weather the Cretaceous-era climate in the South Pole. Today, animals living in Earth’s coldest regions require insulation, whether it’s a layer of fat, fur or feathers-and there’s growing data that shows dinosaurs needed that same protection, too.
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