Friday, September 25, 2009

Dinosaur older than Archaeopteryx with feathers

Feathered dinosaur (Xing Xu)
An artist's impression of how these creatures may have looked

Exceptionally well preserved dinosaur fossils uncovered in north-eastern China display the earliest known feathers.

 

The creatures are all more than 150 million years old.

The new finds are indisputably older than Archaeopteryx, the oldest recognised bird discovered in Germany.

Professor Xu Xing and colleagues tell the journal Nature that this represents the final proof that dinosaurs were ancestral to birds.

Posted via email from Garth's posterous

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