That birds are the descendants of dinosaurs is now accepted by almost all evolutionary biologists. The clinching discovery was of animals that were clearly dinosaurs, and clearly could not fly, but which had feathers. That did raise the question, though, of why one twig of the great dinosaur tree had developed "such strange outer vestments, even before it developed wings.rnIf a discovery announced in this week's Nature has been interpreted correctly, that question is about to get even stranger. For Zheng Xiaoting of the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature in Pingyi, China, and her colleagues, are suggesting that it was not just the part of the clan that led to birds that was feathered. What they have found makes it likely that many dinosaurs had something rather like feathers, and that those which did not had lost a primitive characteristic of the group in the way that elephants and hippos have lost most of the hair that is characteristic of mammals.
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