Feathered Dinosaurs (Archive Episode)

Summary

In Our Time — Feathered Dinosaurs

Host: Melvyn Bragg
Guests: Mike Benton, Steve Brusatte, Maria McNamara
Originally Aired: December 11, 2025

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Episode Overview

This special archive episode of “In Our Time” explores the fascinating topic of feathered dinosaurs, chronicling the transformation over recent decades in how scientists and the public have come to understand dinosaurs—not as lumbering, cold-blooded reptiles, but as dynamic, often feathered ancestors of modern birds. Melvyn Bragg is joined by vertebrate paleontology experts Mike Benton, Steve Brusatte, and Maria McNamara, who discuss the history of dinosaur research, the revolutionary fossil evidence from China, what feathers tell us about dinosaur biology and evolution, and the ongoing mysteries in the field.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Changing Views on Dinosaurs

• For much of the 20th century, dinosaurs were depicted as slow, heavy, gray-skinned lizards. This image was rooted in early discoveries, pop culture, and the sheer “otherness” of their fossils ([03:33] Mike Benton).
  • Quote:
    “We still commonly use the word dinosaur to mean a sort of failure or something that's lumbering and hopeless.” — Mike Benton [03:33]
• The scientific view changed radically in the late 20th century as new fossil discoveries pointed toward a more active, bird-like image.

2. Historical Hints: Darwin, Huxley, and Early Bird Fossils

• Thomas Huxley recognized as early as the 1860s that birds and small theropod dinosaurs were closely related, based on fossils like Archaeopteryx ([05:52] Mike Benton).
  • Quote:
    “Apart from its feathers, Archaeopteryx had the skeleton of a little dinosaur.” — Mike Benton [05:52]
• Despite Huxley’s insights, the view of dinosaurs as reptilian “monsters” persisted for another century.

3. The Dinosaur Family Tree and the Rise of Birds

• Dinosaurs appeared about 230 million years ago, diversified slowly, and dominated until an asteroid strike wiped out most species 66 million years ago—except the lineage that led to modern birds ([08:14] Steve Brusatte).
• Three key dinosaur groups:
  • Sauropods (long-necks, e.g., Brontosaurus)
  • Ornithischians (beaked plant-eaters, e.g., Triceratops)
  • Theropods (meat-eaters; birds evolved from these) ([10:58] Steve Brusatte)

4. What Are Feathers?

• Maria McNamara explains feather development in modern birds, from simple skin outgrowths to the highly branched structures seen today ([12:21] Maria McNamara).

  • Quote: “They're actually the most complex structures derived from the skin in vertebrates, animals with backbones.” — Maria McNamara [12:21]

• Fossil evidence reveals a range of feather complexity—from simple filaments to fully modern feathers—trackable both in embryos and across dinosaur groups ([14:17] Maria McNamara).

5. The Fossil Revolution: China’s Extraordinary Discoveries

• The mid-1990s brought game-changing discoveries from northeast China (Jehol Biota and Daohugou Biota), where thousands of exquisitely preserved feathered dinosaur fossils were found ([15:25] Maria McNamara; [16:37] Maria McNamara).
  • Notable moment:
    “Sinosauropteryx...absolutely electrified the world of paleontology because this dinosaur preserved feathers.” — Maria McNamara [15:25]
• The exceptional preservation is attributed to fine lake sediments and volcanic ash, which sealed in details of feathers and even colors ([18:16] Mike Benton).

6. Vindication of Theories: John Ostrom and Deinonychus

• In the 1960s, John Ostrom’s studies of Deinonychus suggested a nimble, feathered, bird-like dinosaur, prefiguring the feathered fossils found decades later ([19:10] Mike Benton).

7. How Widespread Were Feathers Among Dinosaurs?

• Most feathered fossils belong to theropods, but some ornithischians (plant-eaters) also had feather-like filaments. This implies that feathers (or proto-feathers) likely originated at or near the base of the dinosaur family tree ([23:44] Steve Brusatte).
  • Quote: “To me that indicates...probably feathers go all the way back to the base of dinosaurs. Probably all dinosaurs had some type of feather.” — Steve Brusatte [23:44]

8. Evolutionary Function of Feathers

• Early feathers likely evolved not for flight, but for insulation or display (as in striped tails—possibly for courtship or rivalry displays) ([33:58] Steve Brusatte; [38:41] Mike Benton).
  • Quote:
    “Feathers first evolved for something else, probably for insulation...then that one group of small meat-eating dinosaurs changed their feathers, turned their feathers into things that could form wings...even wings did not evolve for flight...maybe they evolved as some kind of display billboard on the arms.” — Steve Brusatte [33:58]

9. Dinosaur Coloration: Unlocking Prehistoric Palettes

• Modern techniques can identify pigment granules (melanosomes) in fossil feathers, allowing researchers to reconstruct color patterns (e.g., Sinosauropteryx was a ginger-colored dinosaur with a striped tail) ([35:35] Maria McNamara).
  • Quote:
    “Sinoceropteryx...those primitive hair like structures, they contain melanosomes...those melanosomes...are shaped like little balls. So Sinoceropteryx was a ginger dinosaur.” — Maria McNamara [36:12]

10. Mosaic Evolution and Wing Development

• The evolution of feathers and wings was not a straight line but a “mosaic,” with different body regions and types of feathers evolving at different rates in different lineages ([40:44] Maria McNamara).

11. The Bird-Dinosaur Transition: Archaeopteryx to Modern Birds

• Archaeopteryx, from 150 million years ago, represents the first “proper” bird with powered flight, but nearly all of its features are now traceable further back into its dinosaur ancestors ([42:03] Mike Benton).

12. Why Did Birds Survive and Other Dinosaurs Perish?

• The reason why some birds survived the asteroid extinction, but most dinosaur groups did not, remains a mystery ([44:47] Mike Benton).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the cultural image of dinosaurs:
  “People liked the idea because it was something like a fictional world. It was something like dragons and monsters and we all want to believe in those kinds of things.” — Mike Benton [04:42]

• Summing up the dinosaur-bird connection:
  “Birds come from theropod dinosaurs. They evolved from theropods the same way humans evolved from apes. So birds are theropod dinosaurs.” — Steve Brusatte [10:58]

• On the impact of modern Chinese fossils:
  “With these Chinese feathered dinosaurs, they are definitively the most important fossils that have been found, at least in my lifetime.” — Steve Brusatte [23:44]

• On science as an ongoing revolution:
  “This revolution has not ended, it is still ongoing. And who knows what the next big find is going to be, but it'll probably happen in the next few weeks.” — Steve Brusatte [44:33]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction, Change in Public Image of Dinosaurs: [01:55]–[05:35]
• Early Bird-Dinosaur Theories (Huxley, Archaeopteryx): [05:35]–[08:03]
• Dinosaur Timeframe and Clades: [08:14]–[10:58]
• Feather Structure & Evolution: [12:15]–[14:54]
• Discovery of Chinese Fossil Fields: [15:08]–[17:05]
• Exceptional Preservation & Ash Beds: [18:06]–[18:48]
• John Ostrom & Deinonychus Story: [19:10]–[20:44]
• Range of Feathered Dinosaurs: [23:44]–[25:57]
• Feather Evolution Functions: [33:58]–[35:18]
• Fossil Feather Coloration: [35:35]–[37:23]
• Maniraptorans, Display & Behavior: [38:41]–[39:21]
• Bird Survival & Dinosaur Extinction: [44:47]–[45:39]
• Remaining Mysteries & Future Challenges: [45:39]–[52:15] (includes bonus material)

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Unanswered Questions and Ongoing Mysteries

• Why did only certain birds survive the mass extinction when most dinosaurs—including many other bird species—did not?
• Do any sauropods (long-necked dinosaurs) show evidence of feathers? If so, it would further confirm feathers as a deep-rooted dinosaur trait ([46:22] Maria McNamara).
• How did the flight apparatus and feather-bearing skin co-evolve for true powered flight in birds?
• What about the deepest origins—can more primitive fossils push our knowledge even further back?

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Conclusion

This episode offers a sweeping yet detailed tour through the rich story of dinosaur research—from Victorian fossils and outdated lizard-like depictions, to electrifying Chinese discoveries and the realization that feathers are fundamental to dinosaur (and thus avian) evolution. Bragg’s guests distill decades of research into engaging stories and insights, reminding listeners that the dramatic “dinosaur revolution” is very much ongoing—and that open questions remain for the next generation of paleontologists.

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For further study:

• Recommended reading: Works by Mike Benton and Steve Brusatte
• Next week’s topic: Picasso’s “Guernica” and the events of 1937

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Summary compiled for listeners seeking a comprehensive guide to the discussions and revelations on feathered dinosaurs, including key insights, moments, and questions still facing paleontology.

Transcript

[Mike Benton]

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[Steve Brusatte]

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[Steve Brusatte]

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[Mike Benton]

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[Maria McNamara]

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[Melvin Bragg]

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[Mike Benton]

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[Melvin Bragg]

It is true.

[Steve Brusatte]

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[Mike Benton]

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[Steve Brusatte]

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[Mike Benton]

And now, to mark the end of.

[Steve Brusatte]

His 27 memorable years presenting In Our Time, we have Melvin Bragg to introduce.

[Mike Benton]

The final edition in our series of his most cherished episodes.

[Melvin Bragg]

Emily Dickinson wrote Hope is a thing with feathers. We've discussed Dickinson on In Our Time and Hope and writers with quill pens in their hands and the flight of fletched arrows and birds, of course, and more. Yet one of my most cherished episodes is on something that, growing up, I had no idea had feathers. It's just the kind of topic I learned about here first, and it stayed with me. And that's why I plucked feathered dinosaurs from our archive of almost 1100 episodes. The scientific detective work here is astonishing. Hello, hello. Until 20 years ago, dinosaurs were widely assumed to be large lumpen lizards that became extinct millions of years ago. Discoveries in China have since shown dramatically that many were fast and feathered, and some survived the great extinctions and are the ancestors of our modern birds. The recently discovered Chinese fossils of feathered dinosaurs are so well preserved, scientists can even work out the feather's color and, and where they were found on the dinosaurs bodies and theorize about their use for displays, insulation and in some cases perhaps flight. Even the large Tyrannosaurus may have had downy feathers and it appears that the small Velociraptors had long quill like feathers arranged on arms that look like wings. With me to discuss feathered dinosaurs are Mike Benton. Mike Benton professor of Vertebrate Paleontology at the University of Bristol Steve Brusati, reader and Chancellor's Fellow in Vertebrate Paleontology at the University of Edinburgh and Maria McNamara, senior lecturer in Geology at University College Cork. Mike Benton how did the idea become commonplace that dinosaurs were slow, heavy lizards?

[Mike Benton]

I think this is what many of us were brought up with. I think those over the age of maybe 30 or 40 definitely. And we still commonly use the word dinosaur to mean a sort of failure or something that's lumbering and hopeless. So we were brought up with books that show large gray coloured, often reptilian creatures and the assumption is they'd be kind of dragging their tails and crawling around in the swamps. And that fitted an idea that they're extinct and they're long forgotten and that they'd had their day and they couldn't survive. But as you said in the introduction, that's massively changed as a result of new discoveries because they lived for if.

[Melvin Bragg]

We, the human species lives as long as they did, we would be lucky, wouldn't we? Well, yes indeed, or not.

[Mike Benton]

And I thinking of the time they were on the earth, they clearly were massively successful. And so the new discoveries help us to understand why.

[Melvin Bragg]

And did it, why did it catch on so firmly in the imagination of the general public and particularly the younger general public? Why the largeness and the lumberingness and the sleepy slowness? Why was that? And the power of the Coropherosaurus and that? Why do you think it caught on so much?

[Mike Benton]

I think people liked the idea because it was something like a fictional world. It was something like dragons and monsters and we all want to believe in those kinds of things. And there they were. And so you, you, you and they were legitimated because they were real. You could go to the Natural History Museum and see these great skeletons. And I think also for the scientists, the fact that many of them, like Diplodocus and Brontosaurus, were absolutely huge. So they would have weighed maybe 50 tons compared to the biggest of elephants weighing 5 tons. You have to think how could you have an elephant of that size? Therefore the world must have been Massively different. They must have been living in a different way, maybe living in slow motion. And then kids have always loved it, of course, because of the imagination and sort of thinking of heroes and other worlds where they might have liked to.

[Melvin Bragg]

Live, given the interest it kindle once it got started, it took a long time to start. Thomas Huxley, Darwin's bulldog he was called in the 19th century, was someone who dug into the theory, into the postle theory of that as early as anybody else.

[Mike Benton]

Roundabout, yes. And so Huxley got it right around 1860, 1870. He was studying some of the early dinosaurs, particularly the two legged ones that we generally call the meat eaters, that we generally call theropods. And he noticed, and he looked also at Archaeopteryx, which was the oldest bird and still is reckoned to be the most primitive bird. They had just been discovered in Germany. And he noticed that apart from its feathers, Archaeopteryx had the skeleton of a little dinosaur. And so he had a vision of them as a bit more active. And he was pretty clear then, so long ago that birds and dinosaurs were close relatives.

[Melvin Bragg]

What material did he have to work from?

[Mike Benton]

So there wasn't a great deal at that time. There were a number of isolated large bones that had been collected in England from the 1820s onwards. No complete skeletons really. And then I think he was very influenced by discoveries in south Germany around 1860, where they found skeletons of a small dinosaur called Compsognathus and of Archaeopteryx. And of course there was a creature the size of a pigeon with its wings outspread with clear feathers along the wings, and yet he could see that it had a reptilian skeleton.

[Melvin Bragg]

How it was. How was Huxley's news received?

[Mike Benton]

Well, I think he pushed it because he was, as you said, Darwin's bulldog. He was. He very clearly saw this as evidence of evolution. Here was the sort of missing link between reptile and bird. And so he was enthusiastic and I think a lot of others at the time. But then very oddly, we sort of reversed for about a hundred years really from 1870 to about 1970. And it was during that time that more complete giant skeletons were coming out of the United States and Mongolia and other parts of the world. And I'm not quite sure why people stepped back from Huxley's view. Maybe it was just the sheer size and numbers of these giant dinosaurs that they thought, you know, the world was truly different.

[Melvin Bragg]

Steve Rossetti, before we go further, can you give us a few astonishing facts about the lifetime and what they did and why they were there so long and how the, how most of them were extinguished so quickly.

[Steve Brusatte]

Well, I'll try to do the story of dinosaur evolution in 30 seconds or so.

[Mike Benton]

Really?

[Melvin Bragg]

Don't rush. I'll wave my hands if you take too long. Okay.

[Steve Brusatte]

Well, it was a long time they lived. So the first dinosaurs show up about 230 or 240 million years ago. And this is when the Earth is recovering from the worst extinction that ever happened. This extinction at the end of the Permian period when maybe 95% of all things went extinct. So you had this new world after the extinction, open playing field. And that's when dinosaurs entered the scene, along with a lot of other groups like mammals and turtles. And so then these first dinosaurs, they got their start slowly, they didn't take off all of a sudden. They didn't spread around the world like an infectious virus or something like that. They took their time. 50 million years it took for them to slowly diversify until another extinction wiped out a lot of their early rivals. And then in the Jurassic period, dinosaurs spread around the world. You got enormous dinosaurs evolving, the big colossal long necked dinosaurs, the bus sized meat eaters. They were living on all continents. The continents were one at that time, Pangaea, the single landmass. But it was breaking up gradually. The dinosaurs were along for the ride and they continued to evolve until the end of The Cretaceous period, 66 million years ago, when this six mile wide asteroid fell out of the sky, things changed very quickly. The T. Rexes and Triceratops and Brontosauruses, they couldn't cope, but some birds could. And now we have birds still with us.

[Melvin Bragg]

We should print that out and hang it on the wall of most classrooms. Now, what are the significant divisions in the dinosaur mass?

[Steve Brusatte]

There's a lot of dinosaurs now. There's over 1500 species that have been found and people are finding new ones all. It's really an incredible moment that we're all in right now because somewhere around the world right now somebody's finding a new species of dinosaur, on average about once a week. So we're getting about 50 new species a year. This is the golden age. And they're coming from everywhere. China of course, as we'll talk about, but every continent dinosaurs are found on and we're even finding them up in Scotland. So there are so many species, there are lots of classification schemes. These are the things that a lot of young kids memorize and a lot of people like to argue about. But the really, to me, the most Important divisions of dinosaurs. There's three main groups. There's the long neck ones, like brontosaurus. We call those the sauropod dinosaurs. There are the plant eaters with beaks. These are what we call the ornithischian dinosaurs. So things like Triceratops and Stegosaurus. And then there's the theropod dinosaurs, the meat eaters.

[Melvin Bragg]

Is there one group in particular that the feathered dinosaurs enter into?

[Steve Brusatte]

It's this third group, the theropod dinosaurs. So birds come from theropod dinosaurs. They evolved from theropods the same way humans evolved from apes. So birds are theropod dinosaurs.

[Melvin Bragg]

What distinguished theropod dinosaurs to make them carry the feathers?

[Steve Brusatte]

Well, this is the big question, and this is what we're learning so much about in China over the last couple of decades. It looks like feathers go way back to the earliest theropods. And then it looks like one group of these theropods, over time, gradually got small, changed their skeleton, evolved feathers, changed those feathers and turned into birds. So some theropods, like T. Rex, for instance, these were enormous plodding meat eaters. Other ones had crests and sails on their backs. Some were tiny. There were lots of variety of these theropods, but birds emerged from that great.

[Melvin Bragg]

Diversity over 50 million years.

[Steve Brusatte]

Yes, it was a long process. A bird didn't just evolve one day. A T. Rex didn't mutate into a chicken. That's not how evolution works. But it was a long process of gradual change. And at the end of that, a bird emerged, a small, feathered, winged, flying dinosaur.

[Melvin Bragg]

Maria McNamara we're talking about feathers. What do our listeners to understand by feathers?

[Maria McNamara]

Okay, so feathers are really remarkable, excuse me, integumentary structures. So they're derived from our or our skin. And we know that by studying the development of feathers in chick embryos, we can actually work out where they come from. So we know that during growth of a chick, that as the skin is developing, you form a little thickened region in the outermost part of your skin. This thickened region starts to project inwards, forms a follicle. And the cells lining that follicle, they're from the dermis, the lower part of the skin. They die off and they start to form the interior part of the feather. At the same time that this is happening, some cells start to project outwards from the skin to form a hollow shaft. And this is basically the fundamental structure of a feather. It's a hollow tube. But when you look at modern birds today, feathers are actually much more complex. Than that usually. They're actually the most complex structures derived from the skin in vertebrates, animals with backbones. So a typical feather, flight feather in a crow or a jackdaw, it actually has several levels of branching. So that central shaft or tube, which, you know, would be familiar to readers or listeners as the quill part of the feather, that branches into smaller structures called barbs. In turn, those barbs have little branches called barbules. And these barbules are in turn differentiated at their tips into little hooklets that can zip together to form a nice closed vein.

[Melvin Bragg]

One thing that interests me, picking up from what Steve said, is that there doesn't seem to be inside this long range of life that the dinosaurs had any development of evolution of feathers. There were feathers at the beginning, there were feathers in the middle, There were feathers at the end. Is that right? Did they just pop up for reasons we as yet don't know?

[Maria McNamara]

Okay, so when you look across the dinosaur tree, when you look across the theropods and also the ornithischian dinosaurs, we can see evidence of feathers at different developmental stages, different evolutionary stages. So we see a spectrum of fossil feathers that go right from the very complex feathers that are anatomically modern. They look identical to what we have in birds today, right back to clumps of filaments, and even further back to just simple filaments that, for all, you know, intents and purposes, look like hairs.

[Melvin Bragg]

So there was evolution.

[Maria McNamara]

Yes, we can track the evolution that what we see in the developing chick as a feather develops in an embryo. We can see these different stages of morphological development in fossils.

[Melvin Bragg]

Mike talked about the.

The hundred years backward step. It was given a huge acceleration forward with the discovery of these great field of fossils, miles, kilometers of fossils in northeast China, which seems to have changed everything in your area of study. Can you tell listeners how that happened?

[Maria McNamara]

Okay, so in the early mid-1990s, there came, the initial report was of a new dinosaur called Sinosauropteryx. And the discovery of this specimen absolutely electrified the world of paleontology because this dinosaur preserved feathers. So these were very controversial, of course, because the feathers in Sinosauropteryx, they're very, very short. They're only about 10 millimeters long. And they don't really look like the complex feathers we see in modern birds. They look like simple hair, like filaments. So the initial reports, you know, which gained huge attention among palaeontologists and the media alike because it was the first direct evidence for a link between birds and dinosaurs. It was the first Dinosaur bearing feathers. These were actually very controversial because you had some paleontologists who claimed that, who reinterpreted those feathers as other structures, as just fibers from the skin.

[Melvin Bragg]

Can you give us some idea of the range of material available and the vast, as it were, fossil fields there are in northeast China?

[Maria McNamara]

Most of the fossils that we're talking about, they come from two main fossil, the Jehal biota, which is early Cretaceous in age, and this, the slightly younger Jurassic Daohu Go biota. And so I've done fieldwork at some of these localities and unfortunately there's been so much activity and the local farmers are so eager to recover fossils that some of these sites are now very heavily protected by cctv. So, as a paleontologist.

[Melvin Bragg]

So what do you get out of it?

[Maria McNamara]

What do you get out of it?

[Melvin Bragg]

Yeah.

[Maria McNamara]

Oh, I mean, well, in terms of some tax site, you can recover thousands of specimens. So there's. There's a primitive bird called Confuciusornis, which is known from thousands of specimens now.

[Melvin Bragg]

But you referred early on to the thing coming out of German, I think was usually. Which is about a kilometer or so long, this is hundreds of kilometers long. This changed the game. This is like the sort of meteor into the fossil world, wasn't it? The Chinese meter came and changed. Changed utterly.

[Mike Benton]

It did, because. That's right. And I remember people would view Archaeopteryx, the German one, as something really unique. And people talked about it as the most valuable fossil in the world, worth a million or $10 million. And then over the years, a number of additional specimens were found. Each raised a great deal of excitement. There are now about 12, as Maria said from China. There are thousands of individual fossils of the same quality or better. And some of the slabs, you'd swear they make them up, but they don't.

[Melvin Bragg]

What is it that preserves them so well in northeast China and in that particular part of Germany, and occasionally, as we're told in Scotland, but let's stick with China, because that's the big. That's a big resource.

[Mike Benton]

The Chinese ones, they occur, as Maria said, in numerous localities over maybe a few thousand kilometers or more. And these are just great series of lakes and they're preserved mainly in the fine sediments that would be settling down through the water in the lakes. And there's a great deal of volcanic activity going on. So people think that has something to do with the extraordinary preservation, that the ash is kind of settling and that has a way of sealing them in.

[Melvin Bragg]

What does the ash not let in? That's Good not to have let in It's.

[Mike Benton]

It prevents decay. The key thing is normally when an animal dies and if it falls into a lake or just lies on the surface, within a matter of days, the soft tissue will go either to decay or scavengers. So if you can keep the decay bacteria and the scavenging insects and other creatures out.

[Melvin Bragg]

There's this man. Sorry, excuse me.

[Mike Benton]

Then you're in business.

[Melvin Bragg]

There's this man called John Ostrom comes onto the scene. Can you tell us about, give us his dates please and tell us about him.

[Mike Benton]

Yes. So John Ostrom was a great paleontologist in the United States. He was at Yale University in 1963. He was excavating dinosaurs in the Midwest. He found this remarkable little theropod called Deinonychus. Some people may have seen pictures of this. It's often shown pirouetting on one foot, leaping at its prey with a great slashing, flick knife type of claw on its hind foot, sort of leaping and slashing the side of the prey. And he, he speculated this was a fast moving dinosaur. And there was a critical point in 1969 when Ostrom published on this dinosaur with illustrations showing its extraordinarily slender body, that it must have balanced in a remarkable way to be able to achieve these movements. And this was not a lumbering old fashioned kind of dinosaur that we'd been used to. And he noted a second thing. He repeated what Huxley had done exactly 100 years before. And he said, this thing is Archaeopteryx. This is a bird, except we don't see the feathers. But he speculated it would have had feathers. And then soon after, I was at a meeting of the American Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in New York in 1994. Ostrom was there as then quite an old man. The Chinese turned up, as Maria said, with these photographs of Sinocerotteryx. This was before it was published. They're showing them around. He was vindicated.

[Maria McNamara]

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[Mike Benton]

Discover the wit, romance and charm of Jane Austen like you've never heard before. From Pride and Prejudice to Emma, experience all six classics in full cast BBC audio dramatizations.

[Steve Brusatte]

Featuring David Tennant and Benedict Cumberbatch, these.

[Mike Benton]

Productions bring Austen's timeless world to life.

[Maria McNamara]

I cannot tell you how welcome your.

[Melvin Bragg]

Words are, how I have wished for them.

[Mike Benton]

My dearest Elizabeth, can it would it be true that you love me, too?

[Melvin Bragg]

It is true.

[Steve Brusatte]

Listen to the Jane Austen BBC Radio.

[Mike Benton]

Drama collection, available wherever you get your audiobooks.

[Steve Brusatte]

The clock's running out on December deal drops at Lowe's. But there's still time to wrap up something they'll love. Shop great gifts under $50 like the.

[Mike Benton]

Dewalt Elite Series 100 piece bit set.

[Steve Brusatte]

Plus if you order by 2pm you.

[Mike Benton]

Get same day delivery by 8pm Shop.

[Steve Brusatte]

December deal drops while you can. Lowe's. We help you save.

[Maria McNamara]

Okay, only 10 more presents to wrap. You're almost at the finish line. But first.

There the last one.

[Mike Benton]

Enjoy a Coca Cola for a pause that refreshes.

[Melvin Bragg]

Can you give us, can you survey the field, Steve, about which of these dinosaurs were feathered and in the mask, can you pick them out to give the listener some idea where we are?

[Steve Brusatte]

Yeah, these Chinese dinosaurs, they really have been a game changer. And I think we're so used to hyperbole about dinosaurs. You know, you see a new dinosaur in the news and it's, you know, a predator the size of a bus or a dinosaur the size of a plane. And sometimes we can overdo it a little bit. But with these Chinese feathered dinosaurs, they are definitively the most important fossils that have been found, at least in my lifetime. And they're so important because the preservation is great. Get, you know, this, this volcanic activity help preserve those feathers, but also because there are so many dinosaurs, there are different species that are found with feathers. And these things really span the dinosaur family tree. So you can map out which species have feathers on the family tree and you can see how those feathers change. And that tells the story of feather evolution, but even more broadly, the story of bird evolution, how a dinosaur turned into a bird. And so what we know now is pretty much any theropod dinosaur, any member of that great group of meat eaters that is found in China in these deposits has feathers, some kind of Feathers, even tyrannosaurs. There's a 9 meter long tyrannosaur called Yutyrannus there that is found covered in a coat of these very simple hair like feathers. And then there are lots of other small theropods with simple feathers like that. There are some plant eating dinosaurs, there are with simple feathers like that. So to me that indicates, because you have all these meat eaters and plant eaters that have these feathers that probably feathers go all the way back to the base of dinosaurs. Probably all dinosaurs had some type of feather. But then this one group of theropods, this derived group of theropods, of maniraptoran theropods, they started to change those simple feathers. For most dinosaurs, that coat of head, hairy stuff was enough. But these Maniraptorans started to lengthen those feathers. The feathers started to branch out, they started to flatten out, they started to evolve. The barbs and the barbules that Maria was talking about, these dinosaurs started to line up. Some of those feathers on their arms, wings formed. These dinosaurs were getting smaller. And it was that group where all of the exciting change was happening. And it was that group that led to birds.

[Melvin Bragg]

And getting smaller was very important and also changed the idea of the, the great horrible lumberer beast could move fast, could be swift, could be. It changed the nature of life in the dinosaur world, the perception of it.

[Mike Benton]

It did.

[Steve Brusatte]

And it changed the perception of dinosaurs really for all of us. And even though I don't think I'm that old, but I remember when I was in school in the 90s, we still were taught that all of our books in school had these lumbering, plodding, really stupid looking, green scally dinosaurs hanging out in swamps. But I remember in 1997 when the first feathered dinosaur, Sinosauropteryx, was officially named and described. I remember seeing that in the newspaper. Growing up in the middle of America, Ottawa, Illinois, little town where I'm from, in the cornfields. It was in our newspaper, I remember seeing that and it blew my mind because it was such a different image of dinosaurs.

[Melvin Bragg]

Maria, can we come back to you? Can we talk about the differences between hairs and scales and feathers and how that works in the process of evolution to the feathered dinosaurs.

[Maria McNamara]

Okay, so feathers and hair, they share, you know, they have a lot of common characteristics. They each have, they each grow from a follicle. They each, that follicle is lined by cells from the dermis, the lower part of the skin. They're both derived ultimately from the epidermis, the outer Part of the skin. But a major difference between feathers and hair is that feathers are hollow, hairs are not. Hairs have a solid cortex.

And they're both known to develop from this structure, this thickened epidermis called a placode, during development. And, you know, for years, until recently, there was no evidence for these placodes, this developmental structure in reptile skin. So it was thought that feathers and hairs actually were represented two independent evolutionary events, that these two different groups, birds or, you know, dinosaurs and mammals, had each independently evolved these epidermal outgrowths. But then, very exciting, two years ago, a group based in the States uncovered some biochemical evidence for.

Certain, certain, you know, enzymes, genetic precursors for placodes in reptile scales. And then in 2016, so last year, a study looking at evo devo of reptile scales actually found at a very early stage of development placodes. So you have scales, hairs and feathers, all developing in the embryo from the same, effectively the same structure. So the inference is they have a common evolutionary origin. Ultimately, hairs, scales and feathers evolved from the same primitive structure.

[Melvin Bragg]

And what does that lead you to?

[Maria McNamara]

Well, so that implies that, you know, the hairs and the feathers we're seeing in these dinosaurs and mammals, they have a common origin. So, you know, really when we're trying to find, a lot of the work that we do is we try and understand the deep origins of these structures, the wonderful feathers that we see in primitive birds and feathered dinosaurs. They tell us about the end of the story when things are already becoming quite complex. But I think actually a lot of the interesting part of the story will lie in much older fossils. So trying to uncover the very early steps of evolution of these integumentary outgrowths.

[Melvin Bragg]

Mike Benton, can we go back to the Archaeopteryx, this supposed first bird? As I understand it, there was a gap in knowing what was going on of almost 50 million years, and various theories gave up. Well said, oh, evolution didn't happen here now. And then some event happened and pushed it forward. Some horrible monster or hopeful monster, sorry, hopeful monster, that's right. Turned up and pushed the whole thing forward. Let's get over those 50 million years and get on with it. That was more or less so actually what was going on, but then it changed.

[Mike Benton]

Yes, you're right.

[Melvin Bragg]

Archaeoptery exchanged that.

[Mike Benton]

It did, and the new discoveries did, because archaeopteryx was seen as a missing link. People use that term, it doesn't really have any precise definition, but we sort of know what they mean between reptile and bird. And it did stand on its own because you had all the dinosaurs, as we've been talking about flesh eating dinosaurs and others without feathers. You have Archaeopteryx. And then there was a long gap of maybe 50 or 60 million years before further fossil birds. And people said, oh well, birds don't preserve very well as fossils because they're delicate and small and they'll tend to disappear, they'll rot away, they won't be found. And so this was then read by evolutionary theorists to say, how did this happen? You know, how do you make a transition from crocodile to bird? They're, they're close living relatives. And so there were some ideas of macromutations and hopeful monsters, as you say, around the 1930s, 1940s. And some people thought, yes, the only way you can make such an enormous transition is to have some extraordinary genetic revolution, something that we don't know about in current genetics. And that made people very uncomfortable because it sounds like a breakdown of normal natural processes. And the risk, of course, of a kind of hopeful monster is it'll be a failure. This is like such a huge mutation that the chances of it working. And it's still an argument that confuses people who are troubled with evolution today. They'll say, oh, you look at a bird, you know, you look at a pigeon, and it's so beautifully adapted. It, it's got lightweight skeleton, it's got a, it's got a very high metabolic rate, it's got feathers, it's got wings. The adaptation to fly. And we think of human endeavor to make an airplane fly. But the point is then all of these fossils since the 1990s have filled these gaps both before and after. And they show us that half a bird works. You don't actually have to be a complete pigeon. You can be a flyer with primitive feathers and, you know, limited wings.

[Melvin Bragg]

Do you want to help us out in this 50 million year gaps, Dave?

[Steve Brusatte]

Yeah, this is a subject I love to talk about because a lot of my PhD work was on this. And I spent all this time like, you know, Mike and Maria, very privileged to be able to go to China and study a lot of these new fossils. And really what they do is when you map these fossils out on the dinosaur family tree, it tells you that story of evolution. And you can kind of see evolution happening like something of a, you know, running film in action. And what it shows is, you know, this wasn't a hopeful monster situation. A bird was something that emerged very gradually from this one group of dinosaurs over Time as piece by piece it evolved feature by feature of modern birds. I mean, modern birds have a very distinctive body plan. You know, they're small, they have feathers, they have wings, they're lightweight, they have wishbones. They could fold their arms against their body. Hundreds of things that make birds unique among any other living animals. But these fossils show that those things evolved one by one in dinosaurs over time. And usually for reasons that had nothing to do with flight, they were being evolved for other things. So, you know, the wishbone is instrumental for how birds fly today. It's a spring that stores energy in the wings, but that first turns up in small meat eating dinosaurs that were probably hunting. And so they were, you know, reinforcing their, their shoulder girdle. So the same way that whoever invented the propeller, I don't know who that person is, but they would have had no idea the Wright brothers would have put it on a plane. This is what evolution was doing. It was changing features of these dinosaurs. And later on those things would work together to allow this new small type of dinosaur to fly.

[Melvin Bragg]

What was the purpose of the feathers?

[Steve Brusatte]

This is such an interesting area of research. A lot of debate now. What fundamentally we know is that these fossils tell us that the first feathers were simple. The first feathers were these downy kind of hair looking feathers. They were present in dinosaurs like tyrannosaurs and some of the plant eaters that definitely weren't flying. Those animals couldn't fly, they were too big. And those feathers were just like hair. I mean, I can't of think fly with my thinning head of hair, but I can't fly. So feathers first evolved for something else, probably for insulation. It makes sense. We don't know for sure, but you know, these dinosaurs were active and energetic. They needed to retain their body heat. So probably the first feathers evolved for insulation. But then that one group of small meat eating dinosaurs changed their feathers, turned their feathers into things that could form wings. But now we see, amazingly this has emerged over the last few years, that the first dinosaurs with wings couldn't fly either. They were too big, their wings were too small. So it looks like even wings did not evolve for flight. Maybe they evolved as some kind of display billboard on the arms, you know, to attract mates or intimidate rivals. Animals, including birds today, are always using their feathers for display purposes. So I think what we're seeing is a lot of feather evolution had nothing to do with flight. And flight only came later.

[Melvin Bragg]

Maria, because of the plethora of stuff coming from China mostly and from other places. And because of the massive development in technology, you can even begin to tell what color, the colors that these creatures had. Can you just tell us a bit about that, please?

[Maria McNamara]

Yeah, sure. So, you know, if when you look at the feathers of modern birds and if you crack them open and put them under a powerful electron microscope, you'll see these tiny little microscopic structures, they can look like tiny little balls or tiny little sausages. And these are granules of the pigment melanin. And melanin is just one of the many pigments which modern birds have in their feathers. And what's really remarkable is over the last 10 years or so, we've come to realize that these, you know, this evidence of melanin pigment can actually survive in fossil feathers. So, so, you know.

Several ancient birds and feathered dinosaurs have been studied by researchers and we've been looking at the record of color preserved in their feathers using these melanin granules. And what's really remarkable about these melanin granules, or melanosomes as they're called, is that their shape actually varies. And these different shaped melanosomes can generate different colors. So the sausage shaped melanosomes produce blacks and browns. The spherical ball shaped melanosomes produce reddish foxy ginger colors. And so for instance, Sinoceropteryx, that first dinosaur that I mentioned that was reported to have feathers. Mike and some colleagues were involved in a study where they led a study where they showed that Sinosauropteryx, that those primitive hair like structures, they contain melanosomes. So they're very definitely feathers, they're not just skin fibers. But you know, what was really exciting was they showed that those melanosomes in Sinusauropteryx are shaped like little balls. So Sinoceropteryx was a ginger dinosaur.

[Melvin Bragg]

Can I come to. So you discovered the ginger dinosaur. Well, that's something to do, isn't it? I mean, most of us don't get anywhere near that. Can you tell us about Maniraptorans, how they add to the emerging picture? We're still on wings, aren't we? Are we getting towards wings?

[Mike Benton]

We are indeed. And it seems that two things were happening, as we've mentioned, that mostly in the theropod dinosaurs, they had a trend to large size and shortening the arms. And we think of T. Rex as the kind of end of the story. And every child will tell you that the arms are so short it couldn't even reach its mouth. But in the Manirapturans, the name Means hand hunter. Their arms were extending and this is what Ostrom noticed in Deinonychus, which is a manirapturan. And we now know that the extension of the arm was so that it would carry feathers. But the shrinking of size was happening at exactly the same time. So there's miniaturization and extension of the arms. And as Steve said, these were not flying. Or they may have been able to use them at times for gliding just by spreading them out, but almost certainly they'd be using them for other purposes. And the discovery of the ginger color, it wasn't just ginger in Sinocerotrix, it is a Maliraptor and it is a dinosaur.

The tail was striped like a barbarous pole. So it was repeated regular stripes of ginger and white, ginger and white, ginger and white. And the rest of the, the body was covered with sort of ginger color over the back and maybe pale on the belly and various patterns over the face. And so we were thinking, why would it have a stripy tail? Could this be camouflage? You think of a tiger or a zebra? No, because it's only the tail. Why to camouflage your tail but not the rest of your body, therefore display. And as Steve mentioned, this actually shifts behavioral functions. Bird like behavior down. And so we imagine these little dinosaurs hopping around, waving their tails and saying, look at me.

[Melvin Bragg]

Can I come to you? Then Steve, look, as it were researching backwards, what does your present study of birds tell us about where they came from?

[Steve Brusatte]

Well, we now know, you know, unequivocally, nobody really argues this anymore among paleontologists that birds came from dinosaurs and what that means. It means a lot of things. But one thing I would just like to highlight there is that it helps us. This realization helps us understand dinosaurs better. It helps us understand T. Rex and Triceratops and Brontosaurus better because we know that they have living descendants. And so this helps us to better understand how these ancient dinosaurs, which oftentimes are so out of scale to anything that's around today, it helps us to at least better envision what they were like as real animals, as things that had to grow and feed and move. And we now recognize that by and large, dinosaurs, whether it's T. Rex or these enormous creatures like Brontosaurus, they were much more bird like in their behaviors than lizards or crocodiles. So all of this has led to a bit of a new picture of what dinosaurs were like. And I think it's brought dinosaurs to life in a way that we could have never imagined before. These fossils were found.

[Melvin Bragg]

Maria can you explain the uneven distribution of feathers among the dinosaurs?

[Maria McNamara]

Okay, so, you know, one thing that has emerged in recent years is a picture of how birds acquired feathers. And, you know, what we would conventionally consider wings and what we now understand is that there wasn't a progressive change whereby feathers gradually became more complex over time. It's actually a lot more complicated than that. Feathers and wings, they evolved in a really piecemeal fashion. So for instance, you know, you have some early feather dinosaurs like Anchiornis, which has, you know, beautiful veins, so complex feathers on the forelimbs and the hind limbs. But then you look at some younger fossils like Sinosauropteryx, and it doesn't have feathers that are this complex at all. So what's happening with feather evolution, the evolution of wings, it's more like a mosaic, different feature. So the hind limbs and the forelimbs and the tail, they're all almost evolving independently. And these, these changes towards a bird like appearance, they're happening in kind of spurts in different dinosaurs.

[Melvin Bragg]

Mike, Ben, can I come back to you? When, in this 50 million year Spanish, when did they actually start to have proper wings and fly so we would recognize them among the birds today?

[Mike Benton]

I think that's Archaeopteryx. So the interesting thing is there has been stability.

[Melvin Bragg]

When did he come along?

[Mike Benton]

So that's about 150 million years ago at the end of the Jurassic. And So we have 50 million years leading up to that. So just to make it really clear, when I was taught and when I started to teach as well, Archaeopteryx stood there as the possessor of maybe 50 unique bird characters. And now almost all of those features have gone back. As Steve was saying, the wishbone, the hollow bones, the small body size, the development of wings in maniraptorans. So virtually all of these uniquely bird characters have sort of gone back down the evolutionary tree being acquired piecemeal. And so Archaeopteryx is still characterized, and we would say birds as well, by the ability to fly in a powered way. That means beating the wings up and down with the complex of muscles and using that wing beat to keep aloft.

[Melvin Bragg]

So let's get, let's nail it. I was. The millions are rather buffing me when about when you're within a couple of million years.

[Mike Benton]

So the process would have begun over 200 million years ago with the origin of dinosaurs. And then at 150 million, you have Archaeopteryx with proper muscular wing beats and powered flight. And the first bird, as most People would say, and then you carry on in going through into further Chinese deposits and good record of birds right through to 66 million years ago. The extinction of the dinosaurs, the extinction of a lot of these early bird types, and then the massive explosion of modern birds and 10,000 species of birds today.

[Melvin Bragg]

How revolutionary have these discoveries been, these last last few years discoveries?

[Steve Brusatte]

To me these are the revolution in my lifetime at least. And I think they have changed our perception of dinosaurs. I think they're starting to change the public perception of dinosaurs. Of course the public perception takes some time to catch up sometimes with the, the scientific way of seeing things. But they, it's, it's hard to really overstate their importance. And they are beautiful fossils. A lot of these look like they should be in art museum. They are a thrill to study. And farmers across Liaoning province in China are finding these every day. There are farmers out right now, I'm sure, that are finding more of these fossils. So this revolution has not ended, it is still ongoing. And who knows what the next big find is going to be, but it'll probably happen in the next few weeks. So everybody should keep their eyes peeled.

[Melvin Bragg]

To the news peeled on northeast China and forget about what's happening in Beijing or anywhere else. It's Mike, come back to you for a moment. Why did they survive when none of the other dinosaurs did?

[Mike Benton]

And that's a very difficult question because in fact, very many of the birds did die out at the same time as the dinosaurs, the heavier dinosaurs did at 66 million years ago. And so why a number of very weird looking duck like creatures which were the precursors of the modern birds, survive through that crisis? We don't know. They're small, but that doesn't save them from everything. They had high metabolic rates, so a big need for food because people used to say, oh well, turtles and crocodiles survived. They just burrow into a hole and just kind of sleep it off and crawl out a week later and the meteorite is gone and everything is kind. But no. So frankly that is a mystery because the lifestyle of the birds that's survived would have been almost certainly similar to that of the primitive forms that went extinct. So that is still a mystery that may not be solved.

[Melvin Bragg]

Maria, what's the most pressing question you have that you want answered by these fossils that are coming through every day, according to Steve? I mean, as we speak, it's probably mountainous. Anyway, never mind.

[Maria McNamara]

Okay, so, so there are, there are two main, there are two obvious areas that we need to be focusing on in terms of understanding feather origins and feather evolution. So, for instance, we now know that two major groups of dinosaurs, the theropods and the ornithischians, had feathers. And as far as we're currently aware, the third major group of dinosaurs, the sauropods, didn't. So, and this is a major thorn in the sight of people like myself and Mike.

And Steve. We all believe that dinosaurs evolved, that feathers evolved at the base of dinosaurs. We need to look for feathers in sauropods. And to really understand, we need to go way back into, into groups that are older than dinosaurs.

[Melvin Bragg]

Well, thank you very much, Maria McNamara, Mike Benton and Steve Brasati. Next week, we'll be discussing Guernica by Pablo Picasso, the painting and the events in 1937. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets.

[Maria McNamara]

Some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

[Mike Benton]

Yes. Okay, that was very quick.

[Maria McNamara]

I didn't realize you were so, so tight at the very end. I thought I had another half a minute.

[Melvin Bragg]

You have to sort of risk being rude now and then, which is awful, but yet there's no other way.

[Mike Benton]

And Maria, you didn't get onto the molecules in the survival of organic matter. No, but there we are. Yeah, because that's, that's an important question that people have difficulty. Yes, yes. So the question is, and I'll put pass it to Maria, which is people report DNA, people report red blood cells, they report all kinds of extraordinary organic survival in fossils. What's the current position?

[Maria McNamara]

So the current position is if you find DNA in a young fossil, like a mastodon or a woolly mammoth that's about 100,000 years old, people aren't going to have a problem with that. But DNA and other biomolecules, proteins, tissues like feathers, which are made of the protein keratin, these molecules are much more, very decay prone, and they're not going to hang around over millions of years on geological timescales. So claims that these kinds of biomolecules can survive are very, very controversial. And a lot of them are based on evidence from techniques that paleontologists, quite frankly, don't use. So we don't know how to test chemically.

[Mike Benton]

What about melanin? I mean, what's the thing about me?

[Maria McNamara]

Okay, so, you know, melanin, we all know that.

There'S really good and robust chemical evidence for survival of the melanin biomolecule in some of these Chinese fossils. So people have used various different techniques. You know, there's two or three key techniques that you can use to show that the molecule is surviving as well as the actual physical granules themselves. So they're not, as some people claim, that they're not decay bacteria. Basically, you have these little granules and they look like melanin granules and they contain melanin. The most plausible interpretation is that they are melanin granules.

[Melvin Bragg]

They look like a duck and walk like a duck and duck.

[Maria McNamara]

Then it's got to be a duck.

[Steve Brusatte]

Exactly.

[Maria McNamara]

But survival of melanin, you know, it's not too surprising because it's a really tough molecule. You throw acids at it, you throw alkalis at it, and it doesn't degrade. The only thing that degrades melanin is really strong concentrations of peroxide. You've got to really oxidize it really heavily to, you know, destroy it. So that's why, you know, you look at a fossil feather in a dinosaur, the feather is preserved because of the melanin, you know, and this is another big question, well, if that's the case, where's the keratin gone? Is there any evidence for keratin survival? So this is a question that some of us are working on now. You know, can we find any traces of keratin associated with the feathers? But keratin is more decay prone. It's going to be harder to find and you've got to have better evidence.

[Mike Benton]

There you are. Another program people are trying to bring.

[Melvin Bragg]

The urge to amass a few more fossils.

[Mike Benton]

That's right.

[Melvin Bragg]

What did you didn't say? What did you not say? You would like to have said, Steve.

[Steve Brusatte]

I'll just, you know, put out pitch. And we all teach and we all have a lot of students that are, you know, fascinated with this stuff. And there's so many opportunities, I think, for the next generation. There's some big mysteries still to solve. So I think, you know, for anybody who's listening out there, who's kind of a young budding paleontologist or thinking of studying this stuff, whether you're back home in, you know, the Midwest, US or up in Scotland or in China, indeed, wherever somebody needs to go out and find a feathered sauropod, that's going to be a big deal. Somebody needs to find some older fossil feathers. Everything we have with these feathered dinosaurs is either Jurassic or Cretaceous in age. And so a lot of the big moments in evolution of dinosaur feathers and in the early part of the origin of birds, we're not really recording it in the fossil record. We're seeing signs of it in these Jurassic and Cretaceous rocks, but a lot of it was probably actually happening earlier. So if somebody can find some of these sites that preserve feathers and it's hard to do, if it was easy to people would have found them. So you need a bit of luck. But that would be a big game changer. And then the big question for me or one of the big questions is how did flight actually evolve? I mean, we know that these dinosaurs are changing, they're getting smaller, they're changing their skeletons, they're developing feathers, they're turning their feathers into wings. But how did evolution actually make that step to allow these things to start moving about competently in the air? And so that's going to require a lot more than just finding fossils. It's going to require a lot of interdisciplinary work, probably a lot of engineering style work that is a little bit beyond normal paleontology. So I think there's some great opportunities for future work.

[Maria McNamara]

And another area that people haven't looked at at all is, and it's almost like an elephant, the elephant in the room. You know, if dinosaurs are evolving feathers, you can't just have a feather sticking out of a scale. You have to have a very modified skin structure to actually hold those feathers to be able to manipulate them, control their direction. So what we actually should be looking for as well is, you know, features of the skin that have co evolved with the feathers to enable feathered dinosaurs to manipulate their feathers to control them. Because these are all characters that are really important for flight. So we should be looking at also preservation of the skin in these feathered dinosaurs as well.

[Melvin Bragg]

What about you Mike?

[Mike Benton]

I agree with her, I agree with him.

Nothing more to say.

[Melvin Bragg]

If I did that the program would end at about quarter past.

You're the man, he's the producer. Just in time.

[Mike Benton]

Maria's got a train and we promised. You've got a taxi. Yeah, yeah. In our time with Melvin Bragg. It's produced by me, Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios production. I'm Ragnar O' Connor from BBC Radio 4 and the History podcast this is is the Magnificent Oconnors. In war torn London a man is murdered. The police arrest 23 year old Jimmy O'. Connor. He's sentenced to death. But Jimmy is my dad. For 80 years my family has fought to prove his innocence. And now we're making one final attempt to uncover the truth. But are we ready for what we'll find the Magnificent Oconnors. Listen first on BBC Sounds.

[Maria McNamara]

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