The Liaoning Province in China has been known to hold a goldmine of fossils including ancient mammals and birds as well as feathered dinosaurs.
Most of the fossils found in the region came from the Cretaceous Period, but recently fossils have emerged from 30 million years earlier; these fossils are 160 million years old, a Society of Vertebrate Paleontology news release reported.
The new fossils were named the Daohugou Biota after a nearby village. The fossils come from a time when mammals and other groups were undergoing "evolutionary diversification. "
"The Daohugou Biota gives us a look at a rarely glimpsed side of the Middle to Late Jurassic - not a parade of galumphing giants, but an assemblage of quirky little creatures like feathered dinosaurs, pterosaurs with 'advanced' heads on 'primitive' bodies, and the Mesozoic equivalent of a flying squirrel," Doctor Corwin Sullivan, lead author of the study, said in the news release.
The region offers many complete or almost-complete skeletons that include "feathers, fur, skin" and even salamander gills.
"Daohugou is proving to be one of the key sites for understanding the evolution of feathered dinosaurs, early mammals, and flying reptiles, due largely to the fantastic levels of preservation. Many of the fossils are stunning and offer vast amounts of information. There are only a handful of similar sites elsewhere in the world and this article represents the first comprehensive attempt to draw all of the relevant information together into a single benchmark paper," Doctor Paul Barrett, dinosaur researcher at the Natural History Museum, London, who was not involved with the study, said in the news release.
"The Cretaceous feathered dinosaurs of northeastern China have been astonishing [paleontologists] and the public for almost two decades now, and the Daohugou Biota preserves their Jurassic counterparts in the same region. As prequels go, it's pretty exciting," Sullivan said.
