25th anniversary of the first known feathered dinosaurs

Padian, Kevin

doi:10.1038/d41586-022-04586-4

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11 January 2023

25th anniversary of the first known feathered dinosaurs

Our understanding of the origin of birds took a major step forward in 1998, thanks to the reported discovery of a remarkable fossil that unveiled the existence of feathered dinosaurs. Fossil publications that year caused a sensation.

Kevin Padian⁰

Kevin Padian
1. Kevin Padian is in the Department of Integrative Biology and the Museum of Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
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It was the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in 1996, held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. I was talking to John Ostrom, my former PhD thesis adviser from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. John’s work had shown that birds evolved from small carnivorous dinosaurs called theropods¹. I don’t remember what we were talking about, but it didn’t matter. The world shifted when we were approached by our colleague Pei-ji Chen from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology in China.

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Nature 613, 251-252 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-04586-4

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