Did Dinosaurs Have Feathers?

Each major discovery in China, the Americas, Antarctica, and elsewhere teaches

scientists more about the dinosaurs' adaptability in terms of body shape. Throughout the Triassic,

Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods when they were at their peak diversity and abundance,

dinosaurs were able to diversify and fill a wide variety of ecological roles. Dinosaurs came in

different shapes and sizes, some walked on land while others were aquatic, and a select few

could even take to the air. Was it true that they possessed genuine feathers? Most recent studies

confirm this, but that's not the end of the story.

The scientific community has known for a very long time that birds are the sole living

descendants of the dinosaurs. (Therefore if someone challenges your knowledge of the

Cretaceous extinction, you can simply look out the window at the birds outside and say, "See, I

told you so.") Recent discoveries in paleontology have revealed a startling fact: many dinosaurs,

like birds, actually had feathers. So if birds have them, then they must have developed from

something far earlier.

First, let's take a glance at feather ornamentation. The vane of a modern bird's feather

consists of a flattened, generally curved surface formed by a series of paired branches (barbs)

radiating out from the central shaft (rachis). Each barb has a smaller subbarb called a barbule,

and the barbules of neighboring barbs are hooked to each other. Many bird species have feathers

that seem more like loose hair because they lack barbules. Feathers evolved from keratin

structures that were straight, thick, and filamentous. They changed into a variety of stalked forms

that were subsequently lost, including those with branches and later ones with down. This

initially branching state eventually settled into a central stalk with vanes on either side, and the

vanes developed into barbs.

 The first feather-like features in a dinosaur fossil were discovered in the 1990s. There

were subsequent discoveries. In 2011, research was beginning to imply that all dinosaurs had

feathers on at least some portions of their bodies, similar to how all mammals have hair but not

all are hairy. Dinosaurs with feathers have been dated to only 180 million years ago, despite the

fact that the earliest dinosaurs were supposed to have appeared around 245 million years ago.

But that's not the final chapter.

It now appears that feathers did not first appear in the age of the dinosaurs. Some other

group may have been the source of their evolution, according to new research. Another group of

"ruling reptiles" (or archosaurs, which includes birds and crocodiles) with feathers were the

pterosaurs. A 2019 study of pterosaur fossils showed the presence of branching featherlike

structures termed pycnofibres in pterosaur fossils from roughly 160 million years ago. The tufty

appearance of these feathers, as opposed to the smooth and straight feathers of the pterosaurs and

dinosaurs, suggests that the evolution of feathers happened in a common ancestor at least 250

million years ago.