Feathers appeared long before we thought

A predatory dinosaur with bumps on its arms and a strange hump on its back gives evidence that feathers began to appear earlier than scientists thought, according to an article in Nature.

The new species, named Concavenator corcovatus, was about 4 m long from nose to tail and lived during the Early Cretaceous period, about 130 million years ago. Paleontologist Francisco Ortega, of the National University of Distance Learning in Madrid (UNED), found the fossil in a place called Las Hoyas, Cuenca, which was a subtropical wetland during the Early Cretaceous.

But it is the bumps on the dinosaur's arms that have shocked the scientific community: they may have been part of structures with feathers on the creature's bones.

One branch of the dinosaur family tree, called the Coelurosauria, is already known to have developed feathers structures. That lineage, which includes the dinosaur celebrities Tyrannosaurus Rex and Velociraptor, also contains the ancestors of modern-day birds. When Ortega and his team tried to place their find in the evolutionary tree, however, they found that the shape and texture of other bones placed it in the neighbouring branch of predators, the Allosauroidea, but nobody knew they had feathers.

Yet the bumps on Concavenator's arms "look exactly like insertions on rather massive flight feathers on bird wings", says Michael Benton, a palaeobiologist at the University of Bristol, UK.

All this implies that dinosaurs are more and more being considered birds!

Adapted from an article by Lucas Laursen (picture by Raúl Martín)