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Crested Dinosaur Pushes Back Dawn of Feathers
from Nature News
A predatory dinosaur with bony bumps on its arms and a strange hump on its back provides evidence that feathers began to appear earlier than researchers thought, according to a report in Nature.
The new species, named Concavenator corcovatus, was about 4 metres long from nose to tail and lived during the Early Cretaceous period, about 130 million years ago. Its discoverers, led by palaeontologist Francisco Ortega of the National University of Distance Learning in Madrid, found the fossil in a semi-arid plateau called Las Hoyas in central Spain, which was likely to have been a subtropical wetland, comparable to the modern Everglades, during the Early Cretaceous.
But it is the bumps on the dinosaur's arms that have caused a stir: the researchers think that they may have been part of structures that anchored quills to the creature's bones.
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