New Scientist
Image: Madison Berndt
The record for the oldest feathered dinosaur, which has stood for almost 150 years since the discovery of Archaeopteryx, has finally fallen to an even older fossil unearthed in China, shedding new light on the origin of birds.
The first full skeleton of Archaeopteryx, “that strange bird” as Darwin described it, was discovered in the Jurassic limestone of Solnhofen, Germany, just two years after the publication of On the Origin of Species. It has remained something of an evolutionary anomaly ever since.
Spectacular feathered dinosaurs discovered in the last decade or so show clearly how a small group of theropod dinosaurs gave rise to the first birds, but these specimens are almost exclusively Cretaceous in origin, at least 20 million years younger than Archaeopteryx. Feathered dinosaurs pre-dating Archaeopteryx have remained elusive, largely because the Jurassic theropod fossil record is so poor.
The closest palaeontologists have come to a feathered dinosaur older thanArchaeopteryx is Pedopenna, discovered in Inner Mongolia in 2005. But there’s some confusion over exactly how old the Inner Mongolian sediments are, and it’s likely that Pedopenna is actually slightly younger than Archaeopteryx. Read more on newscientist.com…
