Flying reptiles’ feathers for insulation, not for flight

WASHINGTON: A microscopic examination of fossils from China has revealed that the furlike body covering of pterosaurs, the remarkable flying reptiles that lived alongside dinosaurs, was actually made up of rudimentary feathers.

The surprising discovery described by scientists yesterday means that dinosaurs and their bird descendants were not the only creatures to boast feathers and that feathers likely appeared much longer ago than previously known. Pterosaurs were only distantly related to dinosaurs and birds.

Birds need feathers to fly. That was not the case with pterosaurs. Short, hairlike feathers covered their bodies and wings but lacked the strong central shaft of avian flight feathers, the researchers said. They may have provided insula tion and other benefits, as hair does for mammals.

‘‘They were not flight feathers,’’ said paleontologist Baoyu Jiang, of Nanjing University, who led the research published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

‘‘They looked fuzzy, and they didn’t have complicated feathers.’’

The researchers examined beautifully preserved Jurassic Period fossils roughly 160 to 165 million years old of two small pterosaurs called anurognathids from northeastern China. Apparently forest dwellers and insect eaters, they possessed 45cm wingspans, short tails and superficially froglike faces.

Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to master flight, followed much later by birds and bats.

PHOTO: REUTERS Surprising . . . A Daohugou pterosaur, with four different feather types over its head, neck, body, and wings, and a generally gingerbrown colour, based on Jurassic Period fossils unearthed in China, is seen in this illustration handout, released by University of Bristol on Friday.