Which came first, the feather or the bird ?

Feathers came first, then birds

Date: June 3, 2019

Source: University of Bristol

Summary :New research suggests that feathers arose 100 million years before birds -- changing how we look at dinosaurs, birds, and pterosaurs, the flying reptiles.



Lead author, Professor Mike Benton, from the University of Bristol's School of Earth Sciences, said: "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.

Danielle Dhouailly from the University of Grenoble, also a co-author, works on the development of feathers in baby birds, especially their genomic control. She said: "Modern birds like chickens often have scales on their legs or necks, and we showed these were reversals: what had once been feathers had reversed to be scales.

"In fact, we have shown that the same genome regulatory network drives the development of reptile scales, bird feathers, and mammal hairs. Feathers could have evolved very early."

Baoyu Jiang continued: "The breakthrough came when we were studying two new pterosaurs from China.

"We saw that many of their whiskers were branched. We expected single strands -- monofilaments -- but what we saw were tufts and down feathers. Pterosaurs had feathers."

Professor Benton added: "This drives the origin of feathers back to 250 million years ago at least.

"The point of origin of pterosaurs, dinosaurs and their relatives. The Early Triassic world then was recovering from the most devastating mass extinction ever, and life on land had come back from near-total wipe-out.


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