THE record for the oldest feathered dinosaur, which has stood since the discovery of Archaeopteryx, has finally fallen to an even older fossil unearthed in China. The find has already shed new light on the origin of birds.
Spectacular feathered dinosaurs discovered in the last decade or so show clearly how a small group of theropod dinosaurs gave rise to the first birds, but these specimens are nearly all Cretaceous in origin, at least 20 million years younger than Archaeopteryx. Feathered dinosaurs pre-dating Archaeopteryx have remained elusive, largely because the Jurassic theropod fossil record is so poor.
Enter Anchiornis huxleyi. It comes from the Tiaojishan formation of Jianchang county, dated to between 161 and 151 million years old and therefore older than the 150-million-year-old Archaeopteryx-bearing German rocks (Nature, ).
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Anchiornis possesses well-developed feathers on all four limbs, and comes from a 鈥渃ritical stage along the line to birds鈥�, says Xu Xing of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing. 鈥淧robably the evolution of longer and stronger fore wings [ultimately] made the hind wings unnecessary.鈥�
It is unclear, however, whether Anchiornis could fly. It has unusually long legs, suggesting it might have been able to run fast, though the long leg feathers could have made rapid movement difficult.