A new study has discovered that feathers came into being around 100 million years before birds, thus changing our understanding of feathers themselves, their functions and their role in evolution.
The key discovery came earlier in 2019 when feathers were reported in pterosaurs (an ancient reptile). If the pterosaurs really carried feathers, it means these structures arose deep in the evolutionary tree – much deeper than at the point when birds originated.
“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,” said Professor Mike Benton, lead author of the study published in the Journal of Trends in Ecology & Evolution.
“Those fossils all show a diversity of feathers, down feathers over the body and long, vaned feathers on the wings. But, since 1994, paleontologists have been contending with the perturbing discovery, based on hundreds of amazing specimens from China, that many dinosaurs also had feathers,” he added. (ANI)
