125 million-year-old dinosaur feathers were remarkably similar to modern bird feathers, analysis reveals

Feathers from modern-day birds have extra in widespread with dinosaur feathers than consultants beforehand thought and have the same protein composition, a brand new X-ray evaluation reveals. The invention gives new perception into the evolution of feathers over lots of of hundreds of thousands of years.

Paleontologists examined feathers from three historic animals, together with a 125 million-year-old nonavian dinosaur known as Sinornithosaurus present in China; a 125 million-year-old early chicken, additionally from China, generally known as Confuciusornis; and an unspecified species that lived in what’s now the Inexperienced River Formation in Wyoming 50 million years in the past, in response to a examine printed Sept. 21 within the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.