The discovery of feathered dinosaurs led to our understanding that birds are the descendents of dinosaurs, specifically the group of dinosaurs that includes the sauropods, like Apatosaurus and the theropods like Tyrannosaurus.
However, the discovery of feather-like structures in a small dinosaur from the other major dinosaur lineage—the group that includes Triceratops and Steogsaurus—complicates things.
Tianyulong is a small herbivorous dinosaur from China with feather-like structures along its spine and tail. Paleontologists are not yet sure whether these are feathers as seen in other feathered dinosaurs, or some other sort of body covering evolutionarily unrelated to true feathers.
Scientists refer to the structures on Tianyulong as “dinofuzz”, a fitting term because this new fossil fuzzes up our picture of dinosaur-bird relationships, at least for now.
Source: Xio-ting Zheng, et al., 2009, An Early Cretaceous heterodontosaurid dinosaur with filamentous integumentary structures. Nature 458:333-336.
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