feathery | Common News Update

March 26 (UPI) -- Paleontologists have identified a new feathered dinosaur species, one of the last raptors to emerge before the dinosaurs were snuffed out. Researchers recovered the 67-million-year-old remains from a cretaceous rock deposit in New Mexico's San Juan Basin. Though the fossil was originally discovered in 2008, the excavation and examination process took more than decade. Scientists described the new species, Dineobellator notohesperus, in a paper published this week in the journal Scientific Reports. The species name translates as "Navajo warrior from the Southwest," a salute to the indigenous tribes that occupied the land where one of the world's last raptors once lived. Like it's infamous Asian relatives, members of the genus Velociraptor, Dineobellator notohesperus is ...

Two exceptionally well preserved fossils give a new picture of the pterosaurs, the flying reptiles that lived at the time of the dinosaurs.Scientists believe the creatures may have had feathers, and looked something like brown bats with fuzzy wings.The surprise discovery suggests feathers evolved not in birds, nor dinosaurs, but in more distant times.Pterosaurs were the closest relatives of dinosaurs, sharing a common ancestor about 250 million years ago. "We would suggest - tentatively - that it would be worth considering that feathers originated much earlier than we thought," Prof Mike Benton, from the University of Bristol, told BBC News.Hailing from China, the 160-million-year-old fossils are of two different pterosaurs, one ...

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Feathery find: One of the last dino raptors lived in New Mexico

Pterosaurs: Fur flies over feathery fossils