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A colourful view of the origin of dinosaur feathers

Birds and their dinosaur ancestors had feathers, and now it seems that a distantly related group called pterosaurs had them, too. The finding extends the origins of feathers back to long before birds evolved, and sheds light on their role.
  1. Michael J. Benton

    1. Michael J. Benton is at the School of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1TQ, UK.

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In a simple world, an easy classification rule is that birds have feathers, mammals have hair and reptiles have scales, as did dinosaurs. However, the world is not necessarily simple, and it has been known for more than 25 years that at least some dinosaurs had feathers1. Previously, it was suggested2 that flying creatures called pterosaurs — extinct distant relatives of birds and dinosaurs — also had feathers, but that idea was controversial3. Writing in Nature, Cincotta et al.4 confirm that pterosaurs possessed feathers, and also report that these feathers and their surrounding skin were coloured, perhaps providing signalling cues to other individuals of their kind.

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Nature 604, 630-631 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01036-z

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 09 May 2022: The figure legend of the original version of this News & Views incorrectly referred to the Triassic epoch rather than the Triassic period. This has been corrected.

References

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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