feathered dinosaur

A feathered dinosaur is any species of dinosaur possessing feathers. While this includes all species of birds, there is a hypothesis that many, if not all non-avian dinosaur species also possessed feathers in some shape or form.

It has been suggested that feathers had originally functioned as thermal insulation, as it remains their function in the down feathers of infant birds today, prior to their eventual modification in birds into structures that support flight.

Since scientific research began on dinosaurs in the early 1800s, they were generally believed to be closely related to modern reptiles, such as lizards. The word ''dinosaur'' itself, coined in 1842 by paleontologist Richard Owen, comes from the Greek for 'terrible lizard'. This view began to shift during the so-called dinosaur renaissance in scientific research in the late 1960s, and by the mid-1990s significant evidence had emerged that dinosaurs were much more closely related to birds, which descended directly from the theropod group of dinosaurs.

Knowledge of the origin of feathers developed as new fossils were discovered throughout the 2000s and 2010s and as technology enabled scientists to study fossils more closely. Among non-avian dinosaurs, feathers or feather-like integument have been discovered in dozens of genera via direct and indirect fossil evidence. Although the vast majority of feather discoveries have been in coelurosaurian theropods, feather-like integument has also been discovered in at least three ornithischians, suggesting that feathers may have been present on the last common ancestor of the Ornithoscelida, a dinosaur group including both theropods and ornithischians. It is possible that feathers first developed in even earlier archosaurs, in light of the discovery of vaned feathers in pterosaurs. Crocodilians also possess beta keratin similar to those of birds, which suggests that they evolved from common ancestral genes.

History of research

Early

Shortly after the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's ''On the Origin of Species'', British biologist Thomas Henry Huxley proposed that birds were descendants of dinosaurs. He compared the skeletal structure of ''Compsognathus'', a small theropod dinosaur, and the "first bird" '' Archaeopteryx lithographica'' (both of which were found in the Upper Jurassic Bavarian limestone of Solnhofen). He showed that, apart from its hands and feathers, ''Archaeopteryx'' was quite similar to ''Compsognathus''. Thus ''Archaeopteryx'' represents a transitional fossil. In 1868 he published ''On the Animals which are most nearly intermediate between Birds and Reptiles'', making the case.

The first restoration of a feathered dinosaur was Huxley's depiction in 1876 of a feathered ''Compsognathus'', made to accompany a bird evolution lecture he delivered in New York, in which he speculated that the aforementioned dinosaur might have had feathers.

'Dinosaur renaissance'

At the same time, paleoartists began to create modern restorations of highly active dinosaurs. In 1969, Robert T. Bakker drew a running ''Deinonychus''. His student Gregory S. Paul depicted non-avian maniraptoran dinosaurs with feathers and protofeathers, starting in the late 1970s.

Fossil discoveries

The first known specimen of ''Archaeopteryx'', on the basis of which the genus was named, was an isolated feather, although whether or not it belongs to ''Archaeopteryx'' has been controversial. One of the earliest discoveries of possible feather impressions by non-avian dinosaurs is a trace fossil ('' Fulicopus lyellii'') of the 195-199 million year old Portland Formation

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