Tianyulong – a fuzzy feathered dinosaur

What happens when you find a feathered dinosaur that really isn’t meant to have feathers? That’s the question set by a spectacular new fossil that adds a confusing dimension to the origin of feathers. Previously, experts thought the first feathered dinosaurs appeared about 150 million years ago, but the find suggests feathers evolved much earlier. It suggests that their origin might go right back to the earliest ancestors of all dinosaurs – more than 200 million years ago.

“The bad news is that something we thought was neatly wrapped up is now not so neat,” said Professor Witmer a paleontologist from Ohio University,. “We now need to rethink what the coat of the ancestral dinosaurs actually was.” “But the good news is that we can now look at existing evidence with new eyes – going back to old fossils and asking if there is evidence of any of these filaments.”

In the light of this and many other transitional forms I’ve come across for the “dinosaur to bird” lineage in the past few months,I’m sure the creationists apologetic literature will follow shortly.

 

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