The new research is the first to look back at early mammals in full color. Using advanced fossil imaging methods and a ...

Our earliest mammalian ancestors avoided the dominant dinosaurs by only coming out at night and having uniformly dark, grey-brown fur for camouflage.

Feathers are among the most complex cutaneous appendages in the animal kingdom. While their evolutionary origin has been ...

Feathers may have started as simple filaments in ancient dinosaurs, but a team of Swiss researchers is digging deep into the ...

Dinosaurs are the extinct relatives of birds that roamed the lands and seas of ancient Earth. They first appeared around 240 ...

Prior research has shown that patterns in melanosomes can be used to determine feather, fur, or skin coloring. This has led other research teams to learn about the coloring of many types of dinosaurs.

This story appears in the February 2011 issue of National Geographic magazine. Most of us will never get to see nature's greatest marvels in person. We won't get a glimpse of a colossal squid's ...

The earliest feathered dinosaurs may have evolved their bird-like features while still retaining lizard-like scales on other parts of their body. This theory is based on the discovery of a ...

The more paleontologists dig, the more feathered dinosaurs they find. Almost three decades have passed since the scientific debut of the first non-avian dinosaur with feathers, Sinosauropteryx ...

The "proto-feathers" may have been used to keep the smaller dinosaurs warm in polar habitats Georgia Slater is a staff editor on the Parents team at PEOPLE. She has been working at PEOPLE since 2018.

Feathers, essential for thermoregulation, flight, and communication in birds, originate from simple appendages known as proto-feathers, which were present in certain dinosaurs.By studying ...