“15 Evolutionary Gems” #3 – The origin of feathers

 

Henry Gee, Rory Howlett, and Philip Campbell of Nature magazine have compiled a list of 15 scientific discoveries that have been included in Nature over the past decade or so that lend credence to the theory of evolution by natural selection. They call these “Evolutionary Gems.” This is number 3, which is included in the “Gems from the fossil record” category.

The origin of feathers

One of the objections to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was the lack of ‘transitional forms’ in the fossil record — forms that illustrated evolution in action, from one major group of animals to another. However, hardly a year after the publication of On the Origin of Species, an isolated feather was discovered in Late Jurassic (about 150 million years old) lithographic limestones of Solnhofen in Bavaria, followed in 1861 by the first fossil of Archaeopteryx, a creature with many primitive, reptilian features such as teeth and a long, bony tail — but with wings and flight feathers, just like a bird.

Although Archaeopteryx is commonly seen as the earliest known bird, many suspected that it was better seen as a dinosaur, albeit one with feathers. Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s colleague and friend, discussed the possible evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds, and palaeontologists speculated, if wildly, that dinosaurs with feathers might one day be found.

In the 1980s, deposits from the early Cretaceous period (about 125 million years ago) in the Liaoning Province in northern China vindicated these speculations in the most dramatic fashion, with discoveries of primitive birds in abundance — alongside dinosaurs with feathers, and feather-like plumage. Starting with the discovery of the small theropod Sinosauropteryx by Pei-ji Chen from China’s Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology and his colleagues, a variety of feather-clad forms have been found. Many of these feathered dinosaurs could not possibly have flown, showing that feathers first evolved for reasons other than flight, possibly for sexual display or thermal insulation, for instance. In 2008, Fucheng Zhang and his colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing announced the bizarre creature Epidexipteryx, a small dinosaur clad in downy plumage, and sporting four long plumes from its tail. Palaeontologists are now beginning to think that their speculations weren’t nearly wild enough, and that feathers were indeed quite common in dinosaurs.

The discovery of feathered dinosaurs not only vindicated the idea of transitional forms, but also showed that evolution has a way of coming up with a dazzling variety of solutions when we had no idea that there were even problems. Flight could have been no more than an additional opportunity that presented itself to creatures already clothed in feathers.

References
Chen, P.-J., Dong, Z.-M. & Zhen, S.-N. Nature 391, 147–152 (1998).
Zhang, F., Zhou, Z., Xu, X., Wang, X. & Sullivan, C. Nature 455, 1105–1008 (2008).

Additional resources
Gee, H. (ed.) Rise of the Dragon (Univ. Chicago Press, 2001).
Chiappe, L. Glorified dinosaurs (Wiley-Liss, 2007).
Gee, H. & Rey, L. V. A Field Guide to Dinosaurs (Barron’s Educational, 2003).

©2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.
Reprinted with permission per original article introduction.

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