New discovery pushes origin of feathers back by 70 million years

An international team of palaeontologists, which includes the University of Bristol, has discovered that the flying reptiles, pterosaurs, actually had four kinds of feathers, and these are shared with dinosaurs - pushing back the origin of feathers by some 70 million years. Pterosaurs are the flying reptiles that lived side by side with dinosaurs, 230 to 66 million years ago. It has long been known that pterosaurs had some sort of furry covering often called 'pycnofibres', and it was presumed that it was fundamentally different to feathers of dinosaurs and birds. In a new work published today in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution , a team from Nanjing, Bristol, Cork, Beijing, Dublin, and Hong Kong show that pterosaurs had at least four types of feathers: - simple filaments ('hairs') - bundles of filaments - filaments with a tuft halfway down - down feathers. These four types are now also known from two major groups of dinosaurs - the ornithischians, which were plant-eaters, and the theropods, which include the ancestors of birds. Baoyu Jiang of Nanjing University, who led the research, said: "We went to Inner Mongolia to do fieldwork in the Daohugou Formation. "We already knew that the sites had produced excellent specimens of pterosaurs with their pycnofibres preserved and I was sure we could learn more by careful study." Zixiao Yang, also of Nanjing University, has studied the Daohugou localities and the pterosaurs as part of his PhD work.