Feathered Dinosaur Plate (Caudipteryx zoui)

Dinosaurs are not really extinct – birds are a surviving branch of the dinosaur family tree. Archaeopteryx made headlines in the 1860s as a near-perfect link between dinosaurs and birds. The fossil showed large, complex flight feathers on the arms, but Archaeopteryx also had teeth, three-fingered claws and a long, body tail like an allosaur’s. The raptor-dinosaurs Velocirpator and Deinonychus, discovered in the mid-1900s, filled in more evolutionary gaps. They had longer arms and bigger brains than most other dinosaur species, coming close to the cranial capacity of modern birds. In the 1900s, Chinese paleontologists studied and reported many skeletons of raptor-dinosaur with feathers, such as Caudipteryx and Sinosauropteryx.