Feathers came first, then birds

JUNE 3, 2019

by University of Bristol

New research, led by the University of Bristol, suggests that feathers arose 100 million years before birds—changing how we look at dinosaurs, birds, and pterosaurs, the flying reptiles.

It also changes our understanding of feathers themselves, their functions and their role in some of the largest events in evolution.

The new work, published today in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution combines new information from palaeontology and molecular developmental biology.

The key discovery came earlier in 2019, when feathers were reported in pterosaurs—if the pterosaurs really carried feathers, then it means these structures arose deep in the evolutionary tree, much deeper than at the point when birds originated.

Lead author, Professor Mike Benton, from the University of Bristol's School of Earth Sciences, said: "The oldest bird is still Archaeopteryx first found in the Late Jurassic of southern Germany in 1861, although some species from China are a little older.

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