A new Chinese fossil shows that primitive feathers covered a small predatory dinosaur from head to tail.
Palaeontologists have found feathers and feather-like structures on several other Chinese dinosaurs, but only on parts of their bodies. The new discovery is the first to show feathers over the whole animal, showing that dinosaurs may well have evolved feathers for insulation before they were used for flight.
鈥淭his is the specimen we鈥檝e been waiting for,鈥� said Ji Qiang of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences.
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About a half-meter long, the as-yet-unnamed fossil was a juvenile dromeosaur, a close relative of Velociraptor and a member of the theropod family.
Downy fibres covered its head and tail, and tufts of filaments that resemble primitive feathers sprouted from other parts of the body. Branched structures like modern feathers grew on the backs of the animal鈥檚 arms.
The long rigid tail and other skeletal features mark the fossil as a dinosaur rather than a bird. The Chinese-American team verified that the top and bottom slabs which sandwiched the bones matched exactly to assure it was not a fake, like the forged Archaeoraptor ( 麻豆传媒, 29/01/2000).
The 130-million-year old fossil 鈥渟hows us that advanced theropod dinosaurs may have looked more like weird birds than giant lizards,鈥� says Mark Norell, a palaeontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Source: Nature (vol 410, p 1084)