bird-evolution

In 1996, a Chinese farmer cracked open a rock and found a small predatory dinosaur still wearing its coat of filamentous proto-feathers — 130 million years after it died. That discovery, along with hundreds of similarly preserved fossils from northeastern China, permanently changed how science understood both dinosaurs and the origin of birds. The answer to whether dinosaurs had feathers is not 'some of them.' It's 'most of the lineage that gave rise to birds, and quite possibly several others.'