Tag Archives: feathers

Paleontologists have described in detail for the first time the scaly skin of Carnotaurus sastrei, an abelisaurid theropod that lived in South America during the Late Cretaceous epoch, sometime between 72 and 70 million years ago. An artist’s reconstruction of Carnotaurus sastrei based on the scaly skin described by Hendrickx …

By the very early CE in the U.S. Upland Southwest, turkey feather blankets or robes began to replace those made with strips of rabbit fur. Feather blankets would have been important possessions of most members of Ancestral Pueblo communities. In a new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: …

A group of paleontologists led by University of Akron researcher Jennifer Peteya has discovered a new bohaiornithid bird specimen from the Cretaceous period of China with remarkably preserved feathers. Ventral view of the new bohaiornithid specimen. Left: photograph of the primary slab. Right: interpretive drawing. Abbreviations: co – coracoid; cv …

An international team of paleontologists has found evidence of beta-keratin and melanosome preservation in a 130-million-year-old specimen of the Early Cretaceous bird Eoconfuciusornis. Eoconfuciusornis zhengi. Image credit: Nobu Tamura / CC BY 3.0. Eoconfuciusornis, a genus of crow-sized primitive birds from the Early Cretaceous Dabeigou and Huajiying Formations of China, …

It took years for paleontologists to come to terms with the fact that dinosaurs had feathers. We started with “dinosaurs were like big scaly lizards,” progressed to “dinosaurs probably had feathers,” and now we’re arrived at “here are some actual dinosaur feathers.” A piece of amber discovered at a market …