Something Like Feathers Grew on a 247-Million-Year-Old Reptile
Stephan Spiekman, a paleontologist at the Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History in Germany and an author of the new study, said that the discovery could change how scientists think about the origin of feathers. In birds, a complex network of genes is enlisted to sprout feathers from their skin. Part of the network might have already evolved in early reptiles more than 300 million years ago.
If that's true, Dr. Spiekman said, it would mean that other ancient reptiles might have sprouted strange ornaments of their own that are waiting to be discovered.
'I hope this will broaden our perspective,' Dr. Spiekman said. 'And then who knows what we'll find?'
In their study, which was published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, Dr. Spiekman and his colleagues named the reptile Mirasaura grauvogeli. In Latin, Mirasaura means 'wonderful reptile.' And grauvogeli honors Louis Grauvogel, the French paleontologist who dug up the fossil in 1939.
Grauvogel was a wealthy factory owner with training in biology. He spent much of his free time looking for fossils in the quarries of northeastern France, and by the time he died in 1987, he had built up a huge private collection of animal and plant remains. His daughter, Lea Grauvogel-Stamm, herself an accomplished paleontologist, donated the fossils to the Stuttgart Museum in 2019.
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