Feathers Tied to Origin of Dinosaurs

Feathers and other feather-like stuff are known in several so-called saurischian dinosaurs, including tyrannosaurs and maniraptors — the ancestors to modern birds. Now, feather-like structures have been found for the first time in dinosaurs other than saurischians.

The finding upends paleontological thinking about feathers, suggesting they might go back to the origin of all dinosaurs, more than 200 million years.

The newest fuzzy dinosaur is a so-called heterodontosaur (Tianyulong confuciusi) and it belongs to the mainly vegetarian "ornithischian" group of dinosaurs, one of the two major groups of dinosaurs along with the frequently carnivorous saurischians. Heterodontosaurs had fox-sized bodies and lived as far back as 198 million years ago in the Cretaceous Period.

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