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Exceptional dinosaur fossils show ontogenetic development of early feathers

Abstract

Recent discoveries of feathered dinosaur specimens have greatly improved our understanding of the origin and early evolution of feathers, but little information is available on the ontogenetic development of early feathers1,2,3,4,5,6,7. Here we describe an early-juvenile specimen and a late-juvenile specimen, both referable to the oviraptorosaur Similicaudipteryx8, recovered from the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation of western Liaoning, China9. The two specimens have strikingly different remiges and rectrices, suggesting that a radical morphological change occurred during feather development, as is the case for modern feathers10. However, both the remiges and the rectrices are proximally ribbon-like in the younger specimen but fully pennaceous in the older specimen, a pattern not known in any modern bird10. In combination with the wide distribution of proximally ribbon-like pennaceous feathers and elongate broad filamentous feathers among extinct theropods, this find suggests that early feathers were developmentally more diverse than modern ones and that some developmental features, and the resultant morphotypes, have been lost in feather evolution.

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Figure 1: Feathers of two Similicaudipteryx specimens.
Figure 2: Elongate broad filamentous feathers in selected non-avian theropods.
Figure 3: Known feather morphotypes across a simplified dinosaurian phylogeny.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank P.-J. Chen, L.-H. Hou and Z.-M. Dong for coordinating the project, M. Kundrát and F. C. Zhang for discussions, and M. Kundrát and C. Sullivan for commenting on and editing the manuscript. This work was supported by grants from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and Special Funds For Major State Basic Research Projects of China, presented to X.X.

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Contributions

X.X. and X.Z. designed the project, X.X., X.Z. and H.Y. performed the research, and X.X. wrote the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Xing Xu or Xiaoting Zheng.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

This file contains Supplementary Information comprising: Preservation of STM4-1 and STM22-6; Identification of STM4-1 and STM22-6; Additional description of PRPFs (proximal ribbon-like pennaceous feathers) and EBFFs (elongated broad filament feathers); Homologies of EBFFs and other primitive feathers; Major feather morphotypes documented in non-avian theropods; Supplementary Table 1; Supplementary Figures 1-3 with legends and References. (PDF 544 kb)

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Xu, X., Zheng, X. & You, H. Exceptional dinosaur fossils show ontogenetic development of early feathers. Nature 464, 1338–1341 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08965

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