page_title: Origin of birds
section_title: Feathered dinosaurs in China
hierarchical_section_title: Origin of birds / Research history / Feathered dinosaurs in China
caption_attribution_description: Sinosauropteryx fossil, from our trip to Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China for National Day Holiday 2007. This is the Inner Mongolia Museum, the biggest museum in the region.
context_page_description: The scientific question of within which larger group of animals birds evolved has traditionally been called the 'origin of birds'. The present scientific consensus is that birds are a group of maniraptoran theropod dinosaurs that originated during the Mesozoic Era.
  A close relationship between birds and dinosaurs was first proposed in the nineteenth century after the discovery of the primitive bird Archaeopteryx in Germany. Birds and extinct non-avian dinosaurs share many unique skeletal traits. Moreover, fossils of more than thirty species of non-avian dinosaur with preserved feathers have been collected. There are even very small dinosaurs, such as Microraptor and Anchiornis, which have long, vaned arm and leg feathers forming wings. The Jurassic basal avialan Pedopenna also shows these long foot feathers. Paleontologist Lawrence Witmer concluded in 2009 that this evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that avian evolution went through a four-winged stage. Fossil evidence also demonstrates that birds and dinosaurs shared features such as hollow, pneumatized bones, gastroliths in the digestive system, nest-building and brooding behaviors.
context_section_description: The early 1990s saw the discovery of spectacularly preserved bird fossils in several Early Cretaceous geological formations in the northeastern Chinese province of Liaoning. In 1996, Chinese paleontologists described Sinosauropteryx as a new genus of bird from the Yixian Formation, but this animal was quickly recognized as a more basal theropod dinosaur closely related to Compsognathus. Surprisingly, its body was covered by long filamentous structures. These were dubbed 'protofeathers' and considered homologous with the more advanced feathers of birds, although some scientists disagree with this assessment. Chinese and North American scientists described Caudipteryx and Protarchaeopteryx soon after. Based on skeletal features, these animals were non-avian dinosaurs, but their remains bore fully formed feathers closely resembling those of birds. "Archaeoraptor", described without peer review in a 1999 issue of National Geographic, turned out to be a smuggled forgery, but legitimate remains continue to pour out of the Yixian, both legally and illegally. Feathers or "protofeathers" have been found on a wide variety of theropods in the Yixian, and the discoveries of extremely bird-like non-avian dinosaurs, as well as non-avian dinosaur-like primitive birds, have almost entirely closed the morphological gap between non-avian theropods and birds.
caption: Fossil of Sinosauropteryx prima
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS3 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2008:09:26 17:11:28", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4528", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2592", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1563"}