First Known Feathered Dinosaur

First Known Feathered Dinosaur

The fossil of a chicken-sized, meat-eater from Brazil that had a mane of fluffy filaments and a pair of stiff, ribbon-like streamers emerging from both shoulders is the first dinosaur with feathers ever discovered in the Southern Hemisphere.

Named Ubirajara jubatus, the plucky predator lived 110 million years ago and probably used its unusual shoulder feathers and mane for display purposes to attract mates and ward off rivals, an international team of researchers reports online December 13 in Cretaceous Research.

The name Ubirajara means “lord of the spear” and comes from the local Tupi Indigenous language, while jubatus comes from the Latin for maned or crested.   

(image source: sciencenews.org)

Many dinosaurs from the supercontinent of Gondwana, which covered much of the southern half of the planet during the Cretaceous Period, were assumed to have had feathers, but it’s exciting to finally have direct evidence, says study coauthor David Martill, a palaeontologist at the University of Portsmouth in England.

"These shoulder structures are really elaborate; they made this animal look pretty spectacular, just as a bird of paradise looks spectacular today," he says. "When birds have these sorts of feathers, they do all sorts of posh dances and displays, so this dinosaur looks like it was a little show-off."

The dinosaur is also interesting because it is a member of the compsognathid group, which branched off from the family tree of carnivorous dinosaurs fairly early in the history of the group, Martill says. That suggests that the use of feathers for complex display purposes may have a very ancient history within the carnivorous dinosaurs.

Final Words

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