Understanding the Origins of Flight in Feathered Dinosaurs

“Jurassic Park” inspired Stephen Brusatte to become a Paleontologist. Dr. Brusatte was excited to advise producers of “Jurassic World: Dominion” on how dinosaurs have evolved since he was a child. The film showcased feathered dinosaurs which have been discovered since the mid-1990s in Northeast China. But some people thought it was filmmakers trying to do something crazy,” said Dr. Brusatte. Nowadays, scientists are trying to discover how feathered dinosaurs first achieved powered flight and eventually became the birds that soar overhead today.

The first major clue to understanding the origins of birds came when a fossil of a bird’s 145-million-year-old ancestor called Archaeopteryx was discovered in Solnhofen, Germany in 1861. The fossil had feathered wings like modern birds but also reptilian traits like teeth, claws, and a long bony tail. This discovery created a scientific debate that lasted for decades.

In 1996, a packet of pictures of a fossil dinosaur with feathers was handed to a paleontologist, John Ostrom. The discovery of the fossil was a surprise. The 125-million-year-old fossil known as Sinosauropteryx prima, was found in northeast China. Since then, thousands of feathered dinosaur fossils have been discovered, revealing that feathers were widely distributed among various dinosaurs.

Pei-ji Chen, a Paleontologist from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology discovered fossils of an organism closely related to dinosaurs with simple feathers. It was initially thought that the largest dinosaurs were not feathered, but recent evidence suggests that the ancestors of all dinosaurs had feathers. This was confirmed when it was discovered that pterosaurs, the closest relatives to dinosaurs, had simple feathers too.

As more feathered dinosaur fossils have been found, paleontologists now know that feathers allowed them to climb slopes faster, scale the sides of trees, and even glide. Feathers were initially used to generate lift as the dinosaurs ran. Fossilized pigments in feathers have led people to postulate that some dinosaurs were multi-colored.

In 130 million B.C., birds split into two branches and evolved separately. Today’s flying birds belong to the branch known as the ornithuromorphs, but the other branch dominated the skies for millions of years. An example of one bird from this branch is the Caihong juji, which had feathers configured differently from today’s birds, but its method of using feathers is still unknown.

Enantiornithine birds, who evolved differently from today’s birds, survived until an asteroid hit the Earth approximately 66 million years ago. All feathered dinosaurs apart from the ornithuromorphs vanished. Scientists are still investigating why ornithuromorphs survived when all other feathered reptiles disappeared. One theory is that birds evolved beaks that allowed them to eat vast quantities of the seeds buried in the ground after the asteroid, which caused widespread wildfires followed by darkness and a plunge in temperatures, affecting all species on the planet. Despite their origins, feathered dinosaur fossils have shown that these creatures were extraordinary, managed to survive for millions of years, and were well-suited for whatever they were doing.