Were Dinosaurs All Beasts Of A Feather?

摘要

Feathered dinosaurs may have been the rule, not the exception. A stunning new fossil from China reveals primitive filamentary feathers on a dinosaur only distantly related to birds, indicating that all dinosaurs share a feathery ancestry. All of the feathered dinosaurs found since Sinosauropteryx startled the world in 1996 come from a group of two-legged predators called theropods, which gave rise to birds. Now Hai-Lu You of the Institute of Geology in Beijing, China, along with three colleagues, has found feather-like filaments on a fossil named Tianyulong confuciusi (Nature, vol 458, p 333).