Tupandactylus imperator

, is an imposing name for an imposing creature.

She lived 113 million years ago, towards the end of the early Cretaceous period in what is now eastern Brazil, and belonged to the pterosaurs, in English "winged lizards", i.e. those flying reptiles without which, since Jurassic Park III, no proper dinosaur film has been possible gets by.

However, the pterosaurs were not dinosaurs, but only very closely related to them.

The last common ancestor of both animal groups lived sometime in the early Triassic, which began the Mesozoic 250 million years ago.

Ulf von Rauchhaupt

Editor in the “Science” section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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A discovery that a team of paleontologists led by Maria McNamara from University College in Cork, Ireland, has now published in

Nature

is all the more important .

The article, first authored by McNamara's postdoc Aude Cincotta, describes the discovery of small feathers on a T-imperator fossil that appears to have made its way illegally from Brazil to a private collection in Belgium and was repatriated earlier this year by the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences has been.

Two Brazilian scientists are among Cincotta's ten co-authors.

The structures the team identified as feathers are tiny, especially in relation to the massive crest of the animal's head they were found on the back of.

This crest had an extension that almost reached the base of the body of a cello, making it the largest such structure that has ever been described in a pterosaur species, and may have played a role in the naming of the species, which took place only in 1997.

The feathers that have now been discovered are the first real colored plumage elements that have been found in a pterosaur - if the interpretation is correct.

Feathered dinosaurs, on the other hand, are nothing new - all of today's bird life, from ostriches to hummingbirds, descended from theropod dinosaurs, and it has been known for a good 25 years that many non-bird dinosaurs, including those that could not fly and none had flightable ancestors, had feathers or at least individual tufts of feathers.

It has been proven that feathers have only been flown since the late Jurassic, around 165 million years ago.

The difficulty of reading fossils

But those were all dinosaurs, not pterosaurs.

The winged lizards swung themselves into the air with their wing membranes, which they did not open up in the manner of the mammalian group of bats, which appeared much later, but with the greatly elongated equivalent of our ring fingers.

Pterosaur fossils had so far only found remains of downy filaments, so-called pycnofibers, which could have developed independently of the much more complex feathers.