Fossil Clues Point to Theory That All Dinosaurs Were Feathered
The scaly, green, slavering, purely reptilian dinosaur had a good run. Like Pluto as a planet, it’s being replaced by a new scientific understanding, and we just might have to admit that our image of dinosaurs as scaly monsters, as metal as it was, was wrong. Recent scientific findings from Russia suggest that it’s possible that not just some, but all, dinosaurs had feathers, as scientist have found the first plant-eating dinosaur fossils with visible feathers, according to a press release about the find. The newly found dinosaur was named Kulindadromeus zabaikalicus because it was discovered at a place called Kulinda near the Olov River in Siberia. The small, about a meter long, dinosaur showed signs of being adapted to plant-eating and appears to have had “complex compound feathers” around its arms and legs. This is a big deal because the dinosaurs that have been found so far with feathers have been theropods, meat eaters that were the direct ancestors of birds. It’s no huge surprise that Big Bird’s exponentially great-grandad had