Which Came First, the Feather or the Bird?; Dinosaurs and Other Monsters; Special Editions; by Richard O. Prum and Alan H. Brush; 10 Page(s)

Hair, scales, fur, feathers. Of all the body coverings nature has designed, feathers are the most various and the most mysterious. How did these incredibly strong, wonderfully lightweight, amazingly intricate appendages evolve? Where did they come from? Only in the past six years have we begun to answer this question. Several lines of research have recently converged on a remarkable conclusion: the feather evolved in dinosaurs before the appearance of birds.

The origin of feathers is a specific instance of the much more general question of the origin of evolutionary novelties - structures that have no clear antecedents in ancestral animals and no clear related structures (homologues) in contemporary relatives. Although evolutionary theory provides a robust explanation for the appearance of minor variations in the size and shape of creatures and their component parts, it does not yet give as much guidance for understanding the emergence of entirely new structures, including digits, limbs, eyes and feathers.