Blog
Save
Email
Print
ShareThe realization that dinosaurs are closely related to birds raised the obvious possibility that some dinosaurs had feathers.
Fossils of Archaeopteryx include well-preserved feathers, but it was not until the early 1990’s that clearly nonavian dinosaur fossils were discovered with preserved feathers.
Today there are more than a dozen genera of dinosaurs with fossil feathers, all of which are theropods.
Most are from the Yixian formation in China.
The fossil feathers of one specimen, Shuvuuia deserti, have even tested positive for beta keratin, the main protein in bird feathers, in immunological tests. Particularly well-preserved (and legitimate) fossils of feathered dinosaurs were discovered during the 1990s and 2000s.
The fossils were preserved in a Lagerstätte -- a sedimentary deposit exhibiting remarkable richness and completeness in its fossils -- in Liaoning, China.
The area had repeatedly been smothered in volcanic ash produced by eruptions in Inner Mongolia 124 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous Period.
The fine-grained ash preserved the living organisms that it buried in fine detail.
The area was teeming with life, with millions of leaves and the oldest known angiosperms, insects, fish, frogs, salamanders, mammals, turtles, lizards and crocodilians discovered to date. The most important discoveries at Liaoning have been a host of feathered dinosaur fossils, with a steady stream of new finds filling in the picture of the dinosaur-bird connection and adding more to theories of the evolutionary development of feathers and flight.
For more information about the topic Feathered dinosaurs, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles:
Archaeopteryx — Archaeopteryx lithographica is the earliest and most primitive known bird. In the 1990s, the discovery of a number of well-preserved feathered ... > read more
Paralititan — Paralititan stromeri was a giant titanosaurian sauropod dinosaur discovered in coastal deposits in the Upper Cretaceous Bahariya Formation of Egypt. ... > read more
Velociraptor — Velociraptor is a genus of dromaeosaurid theropod dinosaur that existed approximately 83 to 70 million years ago during the later part of the ... > read more
Trace fossil — Trace fossils are those details preserved in rocks that are indirect evidence of life. While we are most familiar with relatively spectacular fossil ... > read more
Short-tailed Albatross — The Short-tailed Albatross or Steller's Albatross is a large rare seabird from the North Pacific. Although related to the other North Pacific ... > read more
Hadrosaurid — Hadrosaurids or duck-billed dinosaurs are members of the superfamily Hadrosauroidea, and include ornithopods such as Edmontosaurus and ... > read more
Pterosaur — Pterosaurs, "winged lizards," often referred to as "pterodactyls" were flying reptiles of the clade Pterosauria. They existed from the late Triassic ... > read more
Recommend this page on Facebook, Twitter,
and Google +1:
Other bookmarking and sharing tools:
more 