AN IRISH researcher is among a team who discovered fossils that suggest that all dinosaurs had feathers.
Dr Maria McNamara, of University College Cork, assisted the team which has found the first ever example of a primitive plant-eating dinosaur with feathers and scales.
The discovery of the new dinosaur, named Kulindadromeus zabaikalicus, came from the Kulinda fossil site in eastern Siberia, highlighted in a paper published in the international academic journal Science last week.
Previously only advanced flesh-eating dinosaurs were known to have had feathers, but this find indicates that all dinosaurs could have been feathered.
Paper author Dr Pascal Godefroit, from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural History in Brussels, explained: "I was really amazed when I saw this.
"We knew that some of the plant-eating ornithischian dinosaurs had simple bristles, and we couldn’t be sure whether these were the same kinds of structures as bird and theropod feathers. But our new find clinches it: all dinosaurs had feathers, or at least the potential to sprout feathers."
The feathers were studied by Dr McNamara with colleagues in the UK and France who specialise in the development of feathers and scales in modern reptiles and birds.
Dr McNamara said: "These feathers are really very well preserved. We can see each filament and how they are joined together at the base, making a compound structure of six or seven filaments, each up to 15 mm long."
Dr McNamara is a palaeontologist in the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences at UCC.
Her research focuses on how delicate soft tissues such as feathers and skin are preserved in fossils.
