A microscopic examination of fossils from China has revealed that the fur-like body covering of pterosaurs, flying reptiles that lived alongside dinosaurs, was actually made up of rudimentary feathers.
The discovery described by scientists on Monday means that dinosaurs and their bird descendants were not the only creatures to boast feathers and that feathers likely appeared much longer ago than previously known.
Pterosaurs were only distantly related to dinosaurs and birds.
Photo: Reuters / Yuan Zhang
Birds need feathers to fly, but that was not the case with pterosaurs. Short, hair-like feathers covered their bodies and wings, but lacked the strong central shaft of avian flight feathers, the researchers said.
They might have provided insulation and other benefits, as hair does for mammals.
“They were not flight feathers,” said paleontologist Jiang Baoyu (姜寶玉) of Nanjing University, who led the research published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. “They looked fuzzy and they didn’t have complicated feathers.”
The researchers examined beautifully preserved Jurassic Period fossils about 160 to 165 million years old of two small pterosaurs called anurognathids from northeastern China.
Apparently forest dwellers and insect eaters, they possessed 45cm wingspans, short tails and superficially frog-like faces.
Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to master flight, followed much later by birds and bats. Scientists have known since the 19th century that pterosaurs had a fur-like body covering and there has been a long-running scientific debate about how to classify it.
Many of the filaments under the microscope showed branching like in feathers, but not hair.
Four types of pterosaur feathers were observed: downy feathers, single filaments, bundles of filaments and filaments with tufts at the end, University of Bristol paleontologist and study coauthor Mike Benton said.
Tiny pigment-related structures indicated that these feathers were ginger-brown in color, he added.
Birds, many meat-eating dinosaurs and some plant-eating dinosaurs are known to have had feathers, although these looked different from those seen on the pterosaurs.
“We feel the simplest thing for the present is to call them all feathers, because they show branching, the fundamental distinguishing character of a feather,” Benton said.
Pterosaurs and dinosaurs appeared about 230 million years ago during the Triassic Period. The researchers said the appearance of feathers in both groups suggests that feathers evolved perhaps 250 million years ago in a common ancestor of pterosaurs and dinosaurs.
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