Feathered Dinosaurs and the Origin of Birds

Fossils show that some dinosaurs—especially bird-related theropods—had feathers or simpler feather-like coverings. Modern birds are the only living branch of dinosaurs to survive the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous. In some fossils, pigment structures help researchers cautiously infer coloration, but colours have been reconstructed for only a limited number of species. The illustration is a synthetic paleoart reconstruction.