New fossils found in Siberia are suggesting that most dinosaurs might have had feathers instead of scales. Although palaeontologists have known for a long time that the class of dinosaurs called theropods probably had feathers, they did not think that other types of dinosaurs had feathers. Instead, most people though that plant-eaters, like the stegosaurus, had scales, similar to lizards.
However, a new fossil discovery might just change everyone’s minds. The recently discovered Siberian fossil suggests that the ornithiscians, which is a category of plant-eating dinosaurs, were probably feathered.
The fossil represents a new dinosaur, called Kulindadromeus zabaikalicus. According to researchers led by Pascal Godefroit of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, the creature lived during the Middle to Late Jurassic period and scales on its tail and shins, but had bristles on its head and feathers on its limbs.
“This is the first time birdlike feathers have been found in dinosaurs that are not closely related to birds,” said Darla Zelenitsky, a paleontologist at the University of Calgary in Canada. “This unexpectedly reveals that such feathers would likely have been present in most groups of dinosaurs,” Zelenitsky explained to Live Science.
The new data could impact the way the globe envisions dinosaurs. Maybe Steven Spielberg will make an updated Jurassic Park movie to illustrate these changes… who knows! All that researchers know for certain is that feathers were a lot more common on dinosaurs than previously thought.
“Feathers may thus have been present in the earliest dinosaurs,” the researchers wrote in their study.
The findings were published in journal Science.