Many different kinds of animals coexisted during the Jurassic period, from primitive birds to two-legged, large-jawed dinosaurs. As different as they sound, archaeologists have suspected that they share a common ancestry. Two new studies of fossils from China show that bird-like dinosaurs predate the earliest official birds, and shed light on the origin of feathers.
Scientists have generally accepted that birds and theropods, bipedal dinosaurs à la Tyrannosaurus rex, share a common history somewhere back down the genetic line, but they’ve had trouble locating ancestors of the two groups. The early appearance of the first known bird-like animal, the archaeopteryx, relative to theropods has been particularly confounding, and has even been taken as evidence by some archaeologists that the two groups are unrelated.
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