Sinosauropteryx, the first feathered dinosaur found
A small hunter is buried with a halo of filaments — and their pigment survives well enough to read its colour.
- When
- Known to
- ± 600 thousand years
- Era
- Cretaceous, Mesozoic
Sinosauropteryx is a metre-long compsognathid from the Yixian Formation, preserved with a dark fringe of simple hollow filaments running from head to tail. It was not a bird and could not fly, which is the point: it showed that feathers began as body covering in ordinary ground-dwelling theropods and were only later co-opted for flight. Its melanosomes are also organised well enough to reconstruct pigmentation, making it one of the first extinct animals whose colour — a chestnut-and-white striped tail, and countershading suggesting open habitat — could be inferred rather than imagined.