Palaeontologists discovered the creature, often known as the “parrot lizard”, had reptile-like skin in areas of the body without feathers. They said the findings, published in the journal ...

The earliest feathered dinosaurs may have evolved their bird-like features while still retaining lizard-like scales on other parts of their body. This theory is based on the discovery of a ...

In the meantime, other scientists sought to illuminate the origin of feathers by examining the scales of modern reptiles, the closest living relatives of birds. Both scales and feathers are flat.

Bird feathers and reptile scales contain melanosomes—tiny sacs holding varieties of the pigment melanin. Many paleontologists suspected that dinosaur feathers also contained melanosomes.

At the time, most reptiles were thought to eat mainly meat or insects ... This extraordinary find had clear impressions of feathers around its skeleton. Birds weren’t known from this long ago, so it ...

“People were fighting about the fact that reptiles either lost it, or birds and mammals independently developed them,” Milinkovitch told The New York Times. “Now we are lucky enough to put this debate ...

Biologists have long known that feathers and hairs both start as structures called placodes. In reptiles, however, biologists had found distinct skin areas that yielded scales but no placodes.

Birds are warm-blooded animals with feathers, wings ... blackbirds, ducks and owls. Reptiles are animals that have dry, scaly skin and are cold-blooded. This means their body temperature changes ...

While many dinosaurs and pterosaurs flaunted flamboyant feathers, early mammals were ... Some fossils of dinosaurs and marine reptiles include preserved skin, but there have been few attempts ...