Dinosaurs with downy feathers may have been able to better withstand the chilling effects of massive eruptions 201 million years ago than other, more scaly reptiles.
Dinosaurs lived in an endless summer, surrounded by steaming jungles and lush swamps—at least if movies such asare to be believed. But that classic image is changing. Paleontologists now know some dinosaurs lived in comparatively chilly habitats with months of darkness and occasional snow on the ground. Frigid conditions like these, a controversial new study argues, may have helped them survive one of Earth’s worst extinctions.
Scientists led by Columbia University paleontologist Paul Olsen zeroed in on the events of approximately 201 million years ago. Around this time, at the end of the Triassic period and just prior to the following Jurassic period, many geologists think massive volcanic eruptions cooled Earth, triggering a mass extinction on land and in the seas. Some kinds of organisms fared better than others.
Plumage might have been their key adaptation, Olsen argues. Fossils show that many dinosaurs and flying pterosaurs sported feather and featherlike body coverings. Most of these rarely preserved feathers are found in later dinosaurs, but other researchers have suggested the last common ancestor of dinosaurs and pterosaurs had some form of feathery coat more than 243 million years ago. If so, the late Triassic dinosaurs in the Junggar Basin.
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