Researchers have identified a feather inside 66-million-year-old fossilized dinosaur dung. The feather belonged to an extinct bird that lived near the end of the Cretaceous, just before the asteroid impact that ended the age of dinosaurs.
The specimen shows that this extinct bird had more primitive insulating feathers than the ancestors of today's birds. According to the report, that difference in plumage may have been decisive: superior feather structure could have helped the ancestors of living birds survive the catastrophe.
The discovery offers a new angle on a long-standing question: why birds were among the few dinosaurs to make it through the mass extinction. The findings are described in a ScienceDaily report.