Scales, feathers and dinosaurs

摘要

Only birds have feathers — or so we thought until the discovery of fossils of feathered dinosaurs in China and elsewhere. Since then, palaeontologists and biologists have together been painting a simple picture of feather evolution based on evidence from fossils and from developmental biology. A new example of a predatory dinosaur, described by Goehlich and Chiappe on page 329 of this issue, makes that picture a little bit more complicated.