Did Dinosaurs Have Feathers

Did Dinosaurs Have Feathers？

All birds have feathers. They have short, fluffy feathers. And they have feathers that are smooth and long. On chilly days, fluffy feathers keep birds warm. Long, smooth flight feathers on their wings help birds get off the ground. They flap their feathered wings to fly and stretch them out to soar. Bright, colorful feathers help birds know each other. Quiet colors can help them hide themselves from enemies.

Birds are the only living animals with feathers. But there was a time in Earth's history when there were no birds. Two hundred thirty million years ago, the first dinosaurs began to appear on Earth. There were no birds then, and no animals with feathers. So where did birds come from? And how did their amazing feathers develop?

One of the oldest feathers we know about belonged to a creature that lived 145 million years ago-about 85 million years after the earliest dinosaurs. All feathers are delicate. None can last for 145 million years. But long ago, this feather fell into fine, grained mud. As the mud hardened into rock, it preserved a perfect print of the feather. This beautiful two-and a half inch fossil print was discovered in 1860 in Solnhofen, Germany, The German scientist Hermann von Meyer named the creature the feather came from. He called it Archaeopteryx, or “ ancient wing” .

Very soon after that, an Archaeopteryx skeleton was found, complete with prints of feathers on its wings and tail. Since von Meyer's time, six more Archaeopteryx fossils have been discovered. Archaeopteryx had feathers. But was it a bird? Archaeopteryx does not look quite like the birds we know! For one thing, it had teeth, No living birds have teeth. And it had a long, bony tail. Today's birds have short tails. Some may have long tail feathers, but their tailbones are small and stubby.

Archaeopteryx's wings and feathers looked like those of modern birds. In fact, many scientists think Archaeopteryx was able to fly. But unlike birds, Archaeopteryx had three long, clawed fingers on the front edge of each wing. Archaeopteryx had the wings and feathers of a bird, but its sharp teeth, long tail, and clawed hands were very much like a dinosaur's. So what was this newly discovered feathered creature? Dinosaur or bird? In the 1860s, scientists decided to call Archaeopteryx Earth's oldest, or first, bird, Nevertheless, many believed that this weird bird must have developed from dinosaur ancestors.