Birds can thank attractive dinosaurs for their flight feathers

How did birds get their feathers? Complex feathers might have originally evolved because birds’ dinosaur ancestors found them sexually attractive.

Many dinosaurs had simple feathers on at least some parts of their body. Palaeontologists think they know why they first evolved. “Early dinosaur feathers really are very hair-like,” says Scott Persons at the Mace Brown Museum of Natural History in South Carolina. Simple feathers were almost certainly for insulation, like mammal fur, he says.

But that makes it difficult to understand why some dinosaurs then developed feathers that…