Exceptionally well preserved dinosaur fossils uncovered in north-eastern China display the earliest known feathers.
The creatures are all more than 150 million years old.
The new finds are indisputably older than Archaeopteryx, the oldest recognised bird discovered in Germany.
Professor Xu Xing and colleagues tell the journal Nature that this represents the final proof that dinosaurs were ancestral to birds.
The theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs has always been troubled by the absence of feathers more ancient than those on the famous Archaeopteryx.
This has given critics room to question the idea.
But the new fossils, which come from two separate locations, are in most cases about 10 million years older than the German bird discovered in the late 19th Century.
One of the dinosaurs, named Anchiornis huxleyi, is spectacular in its preservation.
It has extensive plumage covering its arms and tail, and also its feet – a “four-winged” arrangement, says Professor Xu from the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing.
A fossil dinosaur has been unearthed that was wrapped from head to tail in feathers.
It will add to the debate about birds being descended from dinosaurs and suggests that the evolution of feathers predates the development of flight.
The 130 million-year-old Dromaeosaur specimen provides the best evidence yet that some dinosaurs developed primitive feathers – not for flight but probably to keep warm.
The creature was a small predator closely related to the Velociraptor which starred in the film Jurassic Park.
Like Velociraptor they had a sickle-like claw on the middle toe, sharp teeth, and a bone structure similar to that of modern birds.
When the slabs were separated they saw a fossil that resembles a large duck with a long tail and an oversized head.
The fine-grained rock allowed minute details to be preserved showing that the creature’s head and tail were covered with downy fibres, while other parts of the body seemed to have tufts or sprays of filaments resembling primitive feathers.
The arms also seemed to be adorned with branched structures similar to the barbs of modern bird feathers.
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