“Feathered” Dinosaur Was Bald

Posted by: Loren Coleman on April 4th, 2008

A close-up view of the head and neck of a 120-million-year-old Sinosauropteryx fossil (top) shows imprints around the body that have long been believed to be early versions of feathers.

Recent analysis – (this news is a year old but what has become of this?) – of another fossil of this turkey-size dino species (model at bottom) concludes that the features are actually the remains of collagen fibers and that the dinosaur was bald. The work casts a shadow on the popular theory that Sinosauropteryx and other members of the dinosaur group known as therapods are the ancestors of modern birds.

Are there feathered therapods or not??

“Feathered” Dinosaur Was Bald, Not Bird Ancestor, Controversial Study Says

A shadow of doubt has been thrown over the widely held theory that dinosaurs had feathers and that they gave rise to modern birds.

In a new study, researchers examined the fossil of a 140-million-year-old turkey-size dinosaur called Sinosauropteryx.

Other experts had previously concluded that distinctive patterns found on the skin of a Sinosauropteryx fossil were remnants of downy protofeathers, making the species the most primitive feathered dinosaur.

But the new team says that their analysis shows that the creature was actually bald.

The patterns are the remains of “structural fibers, probably collagen—the most abundant fiber in vertebrates—of the skin and the dorsal frill,” said lead study author Theagarten Lingham-Soliar of the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.

The findings were published last week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Lingham-Soliar and colleagues’ results support the arguments of a small but highly vocal group of scientists who say there’s no evidence of dinosaurs ever having feathers.

“The existence of protofeathers in these dinosaurs was considered critical evidence that birds were derived from dinosaurs,” said study co-author Alan Feduccia, a bird evolution expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“What we have shown is that there’s absolutely no evidence whatsoever that protofeathers existed in dinosaurs, period.”

But the majority of scientists in the field are unconvinced.

“These people have been flogging the same horse for a long time,” said Kevin Padian, curator of the University of California Museum of Paleontology.

“It is appalling that Proceedings B chose to publish this nonsense.”

Making the Case

Sinosauropteryx, which means “Chinese lizard-wing,” lived in China during the early Cretaceous period, about 144 to 127 million years ago.

The animal was about three feet (a meter) long, with most of its length coming from its extremely long tail.

The discovery of protofeathers was based on a specimen found in 1996 in Liaoning Province in northeastern China (photos: China’s fossil marvels).

Mark Norell, the paleontology chair at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, has co-authored several papers describing evidence of feathers in other dinosaur fossils.

(Read “New Dinosaur Discovered: T. Rex Cousin Had Feathers” [October 6, 2004].)

Norell, who is also a National Geographic Society Committee for Research and Exploration grantee, said that such finds have firmly established the link between dinosaurs and birds.

(National Geographic News is part of the National Geographic Society.)

“There’s a preponderance of evidence supporting the idea that birds are nested within theropod dinosaurs,” he said.

Therapods—a diverse group of carnivorous dinosaurs that includes Tyrannosaurus rex—share a number of physical characteristics with modern birds.

Current theory says that over time theropods developed plant-eating habits, grew feathers to keep warm, and took to the trees for safety.

But skeptics of this theory argue that birds evolved earlier from a common ancestor with dinosaurs, and that dinos never had feathers.

For the new study, researchers looked at a recently discovered Sinosauropteryx specimen also found in Liaoning.

“The peripheral dorsal structures are the remains of fiber reinforcement of the frill” that extended from the head to the tip of the tail of the dinosaur, said lead author Lingham-Soliar.

“Their regular nature and straightness defies the notion of them being soft pliable structures [like feathers] but rather high-tensile fibers such as collagen.”

The fibers show a striking similarity to the collagen found on the skin of sharks and reptiles today, the authors say.

And without protofeathers in Sinosauropteryx, the authors argue, the theory that feathers first evolved in dinosaurs—not for flight but for insulation—falls flat.

Incomplete Analysis

David Unwin, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Leicester in England, considers himself neutral on the issue.

He said that scientists need to better understand how soft tissues in well-preserved dinosaurs are actually fossilized.

(Read “Dinosaur Soft Tissue Sequenced; Similar to Chicken Proteins” [April 12, 2007].)

But the new study falls short because it relies only on microscopic analysis, with no additional CAT scans or chemical tests, he said.

“They merely looked at the tissues and said, Oh, they’re straight and well organized … it must be collagen,” Unwin said.

In some cases, he said, the fibers do look like collagen.

“But what they didn’t draw attention to is that there are other tissues in there that don’t look like collagen and might be protofeathers.”

And what about the many other dinosaurs that appear to have been feathered?

Feduccia, the study co-author, says these creatures are actually descendants of birds that lost their ability to fly.

“When they become flightless, they superficially resemble small dinosaurs,” he said.

Minority View

Storrs Olson, the curator of birds at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, has been a vocal critic of the theory that modern birds evolved from dinosaurs.

“The whole notion of feathered dinosaurs is a myth that has been created by ideologues bent on perpetuating the birds-are-dinosaurs theory in the face of all contrary evidence,” he said.

National Geographic magazine and other media have heavily publicized stories about feathered dinosaurs. But contrarian views struggle to get heard, Feduccia said.

“One of the primary arguments used to deflect our view is that we are a fringe group,” he said. “But if science operates by a majority view, we’re in serious trouble.

“We are dealing here basically with a faith-based science where the contrarian view is silenced to a large extent by the popular press,” he added.

The University of Leicester’s Unwin said that science benefits from opposing views, “because it keeps the people who are arguing for a dinosaur origin for birds on their toes.”

But, “to be brutally honest, the contrarian views on this issue haven’t been particularly strong,” he said. “I don’t know if they have really helped shape our ideas about the origin of birds in any serious way.

“One way the [latest] paper may be significant, though, is that it suggests that the story of the origin of feathers may not be quite as simple as we would like to have it.”Stefan Lovgren
National Geographic News

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.


14 Responses to ““Feathered” Dinosaur Was Bald”

  1. sschaper responds:

    I”m not sure how we’d distinguish between dinosaurs that were descendants of birds, and those that weren’t, since they all seem to belong to the same grouping. One can also have a feathered animal lose most of its feathers before losing its skin, and then being fossilized.

    I don’t think this controversy is over, yet.

  2. Ceroill responds:

    I seem to recall the feathered/warm blooded dino idea to have been on the fringe at one point.

  3. Alligator responds:

    Frankly, I always thought that the feathered dinosaur idea was being taken too far, too fast for such minimal evidence. It seemed like overnight, every theropod dinosaur including juvenile T-Rex sprouted feathers. In some dino books, reconstructions were definitely looking more birdlike than reptilian. Feathered dinos was and is still primarily a theory lacking conclusive evidence at this point.

  4. Sordes responds:

    Okay, there is something you should keep in mind about this topic: Lingham-Soliar is one of the very last hardcore BANDits (a group of scientists which believe that dinosaurs were not the ancestors of birds but other, still unknown animals, and BAND means Birds Are No Dinosaurs). They completely ignore many facts and have already made many mistakes, just to prove their own ideas. In fact they act a lot like creationists, and are often cited by them to undermine the fossils of the bird evolution.

  5. DWA responds:

    Science changes its mind about, oh, every five minutes or so.

    Not complaining or anything. Just noting – as it’s always good to do – that we know NOTHING about the fossil record, other than what we SPECULATE from fossils.

    As we are shown, again, for the how-many-thousandth time now…?

  6. Sordes responds:

    Today it is really very very sure that many theropods had feathers, and not only fur-like structures like emus or kiwis, but also actual feathers. Surely not in all cases so extreme like Microraptor gui, whose fossils show without any doubt that it had true feathers, but even comparably large theropodes like Deinonychus had wing-like arms with big feathers. And this is no speculations, as they had even physiological scars on their arm bones which are identical to those of bird wing bones where the big feathers are.

  7. Artist responds:

    Well, I’m convinced!

  8. DWA responds:

    sordes:

    You may be right.

    But all a layman sees when he looks at the above article is: controversy. With points being made that are in no way conclusively refuted.

    And all a layman can say to that is: we have seen this before.

    Science is a very, very emotional field, when it gets right down to it. All I say is: show me the evidence, and refute the other side clearly.

    The above doesn’t look so very very sure to me. At all.

  9. red_pill_junkie responds:

    I’m a layman in these matters too, but I have also read there has been some study of the proteins found in the soft tissue of fossil theropod bones, that have proved they ressemble avian proteins. These guys seem to skip that.

    Nevertheless, this controversy will only be settled when another Sinosauropterix is found. Is that so much to ask?

  10. DWA responds:

    red_pill_junkie:

    And maybe not even then.

    I guess that what I’m seeing here is that these dueling scientists are in the same position vis-a-vis me that I would be in coming out of the woods and saying: I saw a sasquatch! You would say: really? Where’s your proof? I’d say: don’t have any but I know what I saw! You’d say: fine, you have your prooof. But I’m sure you understand that I don’t have MINE yet.

    And I guess I would have to, eh?

    If someone tells me, no feathers, and someone else says, he’s crazy! FEATHERS! All I can say as a layman is: somebody give me your proof!

    I could understand you not wanting to go chapter and verse with me, believe me there. (It’s why I tell people to read up on the sasquatch themselves, it’s what I did.) But what I see here, absent backing of competing claims, is: a controversy.

    And scientists must remember how much of that there has been in paleontology before they go too far with assertions they cannot readily prove.

    These heretics DID, after all, get published.

  11. ahoward3 responds:

    Dino proteins? Fossils have protein? I’m with DWA, let’s have real science, not name calling (they appear alot like “creationists”) and BAND or BAD opinions – controversy leads to critical thinking and keeps us away from a faith in the latest opinon of the day…

  12. slowwalker-32 responds:

    Alas! we will never know the truth about whether some of the early dinosaurs had or did not have feathers, of if they tasted like chicken!

  13. DWA responds:

    slowwalker-32: tongue in cheek as that may have been, it is precisely the point.

    Impressions in stone are not living specimens, or skeletons of living animals that can be directly traced to the specimen they came from.

    They are impressions in stone.

    And as anyone can tell you who has moved a horn to a thumb or a leg to an arm or a quadruped to a biped or a deformed dwarf to a new species of human, most of what has been done with fossils amounts to SPECULATION.

    We’ve always, for example, held the dinosaurs to be reptiles (which are by definition cold-blooded). It seems pretty much the scientific consensus now that, by definition, they are not. (Birds sure aren’t.)

    Intelligent, informed speculation is NOT knowledge. It can be no more than it is. And should be updated as more information becomes available.

    But unlike fossils, you can’t set it in stone.

  14. ukulelemike responds:

    Actually, I thought those fibers look more like this dino had a Fonzie-esque ducktail! Aayyy!
    It may well be that many of the dinos were really neither birds nor specifically reptiles, but something totally separate from both. Of course, being a young-earther, I believe that they co-existed with man, and some of the best examples of what a couple of them looked like can be gained from a first-person description in the book of Job, chapters 40 and 41, where the Behemoth and Leviathan are described.

Sorry. Comments have been closed.

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