AROUND 150m years ago, in the late Jurassic period, one of the earliest-known birds lived among the tropical islands in an area of the world that is now Europe. The fossilised remains of Archaeopteryx so struck Charles Darwin that he compared them to the skeletal structure of a small theropod dinosaur, and he concluded that feathers evolved in dinosaurs and that birds were their descendants. Since then, feathers—or structures that look something like them—have been found in other dinosaur fossils. Now a new find suggests that feathers were far more widespread among the dinosaurs, perhaps even among the earliest to stalk the Earth. Half a dozen partial skulls and several hundred skeletons discovered at two sites in Siberia were examined by Pascal Godefroit of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences and his colleagues. The remains belong to a new dinosaur called Kulindadromeus zabaikalicus, which comes from outside the theropod group, where most feather-like features have in the past been found.

The remains of K. zabaikalicus are dated middle-to-late Jurassic and reveal a 1.5-metre-long plant-eating dinosaur with elongated hind limbs, short forelimbs and a long tail. It displayed three types of scales and three types of avian-like feathers, which would have made it look a bit like a fluffy kangaroo with a buzz-cut (see illustration above).

Many dinosaurs, perhaps even all of them, could have had feathers of some sort or another, the researchers suggest in a paper in this week’s Science. The feathers, they believe, might well have developed as a form of insulation and a way of signalling, perhaps to attract mates. It was only later that they were put to use to enable flight, perhaps starting with gliding. It is entirely possible, then, that even Tyrannosaurus rex sported the odd feather or two. "Jurassic Park" will never seem the same again.