AROUND 150m years ago, in the late Jurassic period, one of the earliest-known birds lived among the tropical islands in an area of the world that is now Europe. The fossilised remains of Archaeopteryx so struck Charles Darwin that he compared them to the skeletal structure of a small theropod dinosaur, and he concluded that feathers evolved in dinosaurs and that birds were their descendants. Since then, feathers—or structures that look something like them—have been found in other dinosaur fossils. Now a new find suggests that feathers were far more widespread among the dinosaurs, perhaps even among the earliest to stalk the Earth.
Half a dozen partial skulls and several hundred skeletons discovered at two sites in Siberia were examined by Pascal Godefroit of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences and his colleagues. The remains belong to a new dinosaur called Kulindadromeus zabaikalicus, which comes from outside the theropod group, where most feather-like features have in the past been found.
