A recent story of a non-feathered dinosaur in a presumably feathered clade is stirring the pot a bit right now. The importance of shared derived characters in systematics is one reason that something like feathers tends to elicit a response from many scientists, since one character might result in the reworking of the tree of life. But there are other ways to study feathers aside from paleontology, in particular, I point you to the work of Richard Prum (in particular, this paper) and Matthew Harris. Development and genetics can be crucial supplements to the fossil evidence in this case, though dinosaurs are no longer around, birds and the crocodilian outgroup are.
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tags: researchblogging.org, blue feathers,
While it was often hypothesized in the 20th century that dinosaurs were the evolutionary ancestors of birds, it wasn't until the late 1980s that we found the first firm evidence of a dinosaur with feathers - specifically, quill knobs (which are strongly correlated with large and well-developed se
Beipaiosaurus was among the strangest of dinosaurs.
For a long time feathered dinosaurs just looked weird to me. Seeing fuzzy Deinonychus or some other dromeosaur with a splash of plumage never looked quite right and I didn't understand why in the course of a few years predatory dinosaurs went from being scaly to being covered in down.