A few years ago, Maria McNamara was invited to Brussels by fellow paleontologist Pascal Godefroit and presented with an intriguing opportunity. At the time, they were collaborating on a study of an ...

The debate about when dinosaurs developed feathers has taken a new turn with a paper refuting earlier claims that feathers were also found on dinosaurs' relatives, the flying reptiles called ...

Body coverings such as hair and feathers have played a central role in evolution. They enabled warm-bloodedness by insulating the body, and were used for courtship, display, deterrence of enemies and, ...

The evolution of feathers in ancient animals was restricted to dinosaurs and their modern bird descendants. However, a reptile of the Middle Triassic period evolved something similar to feathers, ...

A new species of prehistoric reptile, Mirasaura grauvogeli, was identified by scientists. The findings were recently published in the journal Nature. Mirasaura grauvogeli was a prehistoric animal that ...

The fossilized head crest of a pterosaur with evidence of feathers. Cincotta, A. et al. Nature (2022) Paleontologists studying a well-preserved head crest belonging to a species of pterosaurs say the ...

Debate is raging about whether pterosaurs, flying reptiles that lived alongside the dinosaurs, had feathers or not. Two years ago a study claimed to have found fossil evidence of “protofeathers” on ...

Pterosaurs – flying reptiles that cruised the skies millions of years ago – may have had multicoloured feathers. We know that some dinosaurs, which are cousins of pterosaurs, had feathers like this, ...

South Korean scientists developed a robot dinosaur to scare grasshoppers for an experiment to determine why ancient reptiles developed feathers, according to a recent paper published in the journal ...

Widespread volcanic eruptions around 202 million years ago had a profound effect on Earth’s climate, triggering a mass extinction event that killed off three-fourths of the planet’s species, including ...

The notion of a dinosaur with Cher-like hair is entertaining. It's also outlandish, according to experts. Paleontologist Jingmai O'Connor, associate curator of fossil reptiles at Chicago's Field ...