Eighty million years ahead of its time

摘要

Fossil feathers provided the definitive proof that birds descended from dinosaurs. There is one extinct beast that doesn't fit the picture, though. It is called Longisquama insignis, and it lived 230 to 240 million years ago - just before the dinosaurs evolved, and 70 to 80 million years before the first fossils of feathered dinobirds.