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One of the earliest discoveries of possible feather impressions by non-avian dinosaurs is a trace fossil ( Fulicopus lyellii) of the 195-199 million year old Portland Formation in the northeastern United States. The first known specimen of Archaeopteryx, on the basis of which the genus was named, was an isolated feather, although whether or not it belongs to Archaeopteryx has been controversial. Fossil discoveries Ĭast in Japan of a resting trace from Massachusetts, which was argued to have been made by a theropod like Dilophosaurus and to include feather impressions around the belly (arrow), but this has been questioned
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Paul depicted non-avian maniraptoran dinosaurs with feathers and protofeathers, starting in the late 1970s. 'Dinosaur renaissance' Īt the same time, paleoartists began to create modern restorations of highly active dinosaurs. The first restoration of a feathered dinosaur was Huxley's depiction in 1876 of a feathered Compsognathus, made to accompany a bird evolution lecture he delivered in New York, in which he speculated that the aforementioned dinosaur might have had feathers. In 1868 he published On the Animals which are most nearly intermediate between Birds and Reptiles, making the case. Thus Archaeopteryx represents a transitional fossil. He showed that, apart from its hands and feathers, Archaeopteryx was quite similar to Compsognathus. He compared the skeletal structure of Compsognathus, a small theropod dinosaur, and the "first bird" Archaeopteryx lithographica (both of which were found in the Upper Jurassic Bavarian limestone of Solnhofen). Shortly after the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, British biologist Thomas Henry Huxley proposed that birds were descendants of dinosaurs. Crocodilians also possess beta keratin similar to those of birds, which suggests that they evolved from common ancestral genes. It is possible that feathers first developed in even earlier archosaurs, in light of the discovery of vaned feathers in pterosaurs.
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Although the vast majority of feather discoveries have been in coelurosaurian theropods, feather-like integument has also been discovered in at least three ornithischians, suggesting that feathers may have been present on the last common ancestor of the Ornithoscelida, a dinosaur group including both theropods and ornithischians. Among non-avian dinosaurs, feathers or feather-like integument have been discovered in dozens of genera via direct and indirect fossil evidence. Knowledge of the origin of feathers developed as new fossils were discovered throughout the 2000s and 2010s and as technology enabled scientists to study fossils more closely. This view began to shift during the so-called dinosaur renaissance in scientific research in the late 1960s, and by the mid-1990s significant evidence had emerged that dinosaurs were much more closely related to birds, which descended directly from the theropod group of dinosaurs. The word dinosaur itself, coined in 1842 by paleontologist Richard Owen, comes from the Greek for 'terrible lizard'. Since scientific research began on dinosaurs in the early 1800s, they were generally believed to be closely related to modern reptiles, such as lizards. It has been suggested that feathers had originally functioned as thermal insulation, as it remains their function in the down feathers of infant birds today, prior to their eventual modification in birds into structures that support flight. While this includes all species of birds, there is a hypothesis that many, if not all non-avian dinosaur species also possessed feathers in some shape or form. Illustration depicting an individual of Acheroraptor with pennaceous feathersĪ feathered dinosaur is any species of dinosaur possessing feathers.