An amazingly well-preserved fossil suggests the common ancestor of dinosaurs and pterosaurs also had some type of feather or feather precursor
Long before the first birds flapped and fluttered, pterosaurs took to the skies. These leathery-winged reptiles, their bodies coated with wispy filaments paleontologists call pycnofibers, were the first vertebrates to truly fly.
The unauthorized excavation of fossils in Brazil and the private ownership of such fossils have been illegal since 1942, and the Crato Formation was not mined until sometime after that year, says paleontology Ph.D. student Rodrigo Pêgas of the Federal University of ABC in Brazil, who was not involved with the new study.
Paleontologists have recently questioned earlier hypotheses about which melanosome shapes create which particular shades. “In the pterosaur we studied, we didn’t attempt to infer the color produced,” McNamara says. Still, she notes, the melanosome shapes are different in the two different filament types—whether they are interpreted as pycnofibers or feathers—which indicates varied hues, with the branched filaments likely being lighter in color than the unbranched ones.
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