Jurassic Fossil Find Has Feathered Dinos, Airborne Mammals
Jurassic Fossil Find Has Feathered Dinos, Airborne Mammals
Mar 4, 2014 01:00 PM ET // by Jennifer Viegas
A veritable Jurassic paradise is providing an exceptional window on life approximately 160 million years ago.
The fossil assemblage, called the Daohugou Biota, is described in the latest issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. The fossils, all found in and around what is now Inner Mongolia, China, date from a time when many important animal groups, including our own (mammals), were undergoing noteworthy evolutionary changes.
The collection features such memorable creatures as the oldest known gliding mammal, another early mammal that may have swum with a beaver-like tail, the oldest dinosaurs preserved with feathers and a pterosaur that represents an important transitional form among these now extinct, warm-blooded flying reptiles.
“The Daohugou Biota gives us a look at a rarely glimpsed side of the Middle to Late Jurassic — not a parade of galumphing giants, but an assemblage of quirky little creatures like feathered dinosaurs, pterosaurs with advanced heads on primitive bodies, and the Mesozoic equivalent of a flying squirrel,” lead author Corwin Sullivan, an associate professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, was quoted as saying in a press release.
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