New study pushes origin of feathers back by 70 million years

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BEIJING, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- An international team of paleontologists have found that pterosaurs, reptiles often referred to as "flying dinosaurs", had four types of feathers, a discovery that pushes back the origin of feathers by 70 million years.

From the late Triassic period to the end of the Cretaceous (230 to 66 million years ago), pterosaurs lived side by side with dinosaurs, but were only distantly related to dinosaurs and birds. They were the earliest vertebrates known to have evolved true flapping flight.

Paleontologists have long known that pterosaurs had some sort of hair-like filaments called "pycnofibers" on the head and body. It was previously accepted that the furry covering was different from feathers of dinosaurs and birds.

In a study published in the latest issue of British journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, paleontologists from China's Nanjing University, the University of Bristol in Britain and other research institutions reported that pterosaur pycnofibers were four types of feathers.

Two "hairy" pterosaur fossils found in Daohugou Formation in Inner Mongolia, north China, caught the eyes of researchers with their well-preserved pycnofibers. Daohugou is known for its well-preserved fossils from between 165 million and 160 million years ago.

"We already knew that the sites had produced excellent specimens of pterosaurs with their pycnofibers preserved and I was sure we could learn more by careful study," said Jiang Baoyu of Nanjing University who led the research, in a press release.

With examination under high-powered microscopes and evolutionary analyses, the researchers found no anatomical evidence that the four types of feathers - simple filaments, filament bunches, filaments with a tuft, and down feathers - were different from those in some dinosaur groups and modern birds.

They likely played functional roles in heat regulation, sensing, signaling and aerodynamics.

If they were indeed feathers, they pointed to an evolutionary origin when the common ancestors of pterosaurs and birds may have had feathers. And that was roughly 250 million years ago, about 70 million years earlier than previously thought, said Jiang.

Around that time, life was recovering from the devastating Permian mass extinction, and land vertebrates, including the ancestors of dinosaurs, had switched gait from sprawling to upright and even acquired some degree of warm-bloodedness, said Mike Benton, from the University of Bristol, who ran evolutionary analyses in the study. Enditem

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