PALAEONTOLOGISTS claim to have found feathers on a lizard-sized reptile that
evolved 220 million years ago, 70 million years before the oldest known bird,
Archaeopteryx.
The long-neglected fossil, called Longisquama insignis, has
reignited the debate over whether birds are feathered dinosaurs or whether they
evolved from earlier reptiles. “It’s a stake in the heart of the dinosaur
theory, which I haven’t believed in years,” says Storrs Olson of the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington DC. But many experts doubt the fossil shows feathers
or was even related to birds.
Russian palaeontologist Alexander Sharov found the fossil in Kyrgyzstan some
30 years…
