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Palaeontology

Scales, feathers and dinosaurs

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A fossil dinosaur that ‘nests’ with feathered relations in the dinosaur phylogenetic tree did not, it seems, have feathers. The discovery will encourage a re-evaluation of feather evolution.

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Figure 1: Dinosaurs and feather evolution.

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Xu, X. Scales, feathers and dinosaurs. Nature 440, 287–288 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/440287a

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