Dinosaur ate meat, also had feathers
From Times Staff and Wire Reports
The vicious little dinosaur velociraptor was a feathered fiend, said scientists who found evidence of quills on this well-known meat-eater’s forearm.
In research published Friday in the journal Science, paleontologists said a forearm bone of velociraptor found in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert retained structures, or quill knobs, where a series of feathers were anchored to the bone with ligaments. No actual fossils of the feathers were found, but researchers said quill knobs would not exist without feathers.
Researchers said the discovery was an indication that many carnivorous dinosaurs, and not just the smallest, had feathers.
