Near the coast of present-day Brazil, marine sediment preserved a bird-like pterosaur with a 10-foot wingspan, disproportionately large head and prominent cranial crest for a hundred million years.
In 2015, Aude Cincotta, a paleontology Ph.D. student at the University of Namur, realized with her colleagues that they were looking at a remarkable fossil. It contained the large, mostly intact head crest of an adult Tupandactylus imperator.
“In order to have this exceptional level of soft tissue preservation, the fossil has to be rapidly covered in sediment and kept in a low oxygen environment,” says Cincotta, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences.
With this fossil, Cincotta and her team discovered that not only did pterosaurs have feathers, but their feathers displayed color patterns. Importantly, this meant that avemetatarsalians, a clade of reptiles that lived during the early Triassic Period, were the first creatures to develop colored ...
