Growing up, I was always interested in dinosaurs, loved movies like Jurassic Park as a child, and bonded with my family by watching Animal Planet and NOVA specials on evolution and above all human and dinosaur evolution. At one point in my life, I wanted to be a paleontologist. I'm sure we all know the fact that our modern birds evolved from dinosaurs and that one of the very first things that made paleontologists realize this fact was the discovery of bird-like dinosaurs and eventually feathered dinosaurs. The research question I ask is simple: how and why did dinosaur feathers evolve? I will use three very different research papers to learn more about this question and try to find some answers. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The first article, “Feathers, Dinosaurs, and Behavioral Signals: Defining the Visual Display Hypothesis for the Adaptive Function of Feathers in Non-avian Therapods,” lists the three dominant hypotheses for the adaptive function of early feathers (Phase 1 ): flight, thermoregulation, and visual display, and provides further detail on the visual display hypothesis in hopes of generating questions for future research. Of these hypotheses, the least likely would have been the flight hypothesis, since the feathers of Stage 1 would not have been able to lift aerodynamically, while the thermoregulation hypothesis was said to be likely, however it depended on the concentration of the feathers of the Stage 1 on the therapod (Dimond et al. 2011). A therapod is basically a bipedal carnivorous dinosaur, usually with light arms, for example the Tyrannosaurus Rex. The visual display hypothesis at the time of this article was said to be under-researched and was an area of ​​further research, particularly into whether or not Phase 1 feathers would be capable of performing some sort of visual display in terms of pigmentation. or pattern, as well as the ability of the receiving organism to even identify the image using vision to discern the finest details. It was argued that analyzing the adaptive functions of early feathers was difficult because at the time there were no fossil examples detailing the morphology of such Stage 1 feathers, and so this is the main reason why this article is not very based on experimentation. This article explained in easy-to-understand words the main questions paleontologists and evolutionary biologists ask about dinosaur feathers and emphasized further research into the discovery of therapod fossils with these Stage 1 feathers in order to have enough evidence to support or deny the visual display hypothesis. The second paper, “Bristles before down: A new perspective on the Functional Origin of Feathers,” presents the possibility that early feathers may have resembled bristle-like structures, which may have served tactile purposes somewhat like whiskers on a cat, using evidence from a 2011 paper by Cunningham in which high concentrations of mechanoreceptors were observed at the base of the bristles. These bristles would then develop into the first feathers which continued to become more complex. This article argues that the thermal insulation hypothesis for the origin of the first feathers is inadequate because they could only serve as an insulator in sufficiently high concentrations, implying the development of the first feathers in large concentrations. The authors of this article are open to the possibility of the development of large concentrations and the development of these firstbristle and feather structures may have been encouraged in endothermic dinosaurs, since the phylogenetic distribution of feathered dinosaurs appears to generally match the distribution of those that evolved endothermy. However, the fact that thermal insulation is the first functional origin of the first feathers is very unlikely, again due to this issue of concentration. In this way, these early feathers may have served a similar purpose to that of mammalian hair. The researchers are also not supporters of the sexual display hypothesis as they argue that nothing in particular in early feathers supports sexual display and that sexual display is an explanation that could be applied to any visible structure on an animal. This new “tactile bristle hypothesis” presented in this article was an idea for future paleontological research and consideration, to try to present an alternative explanation for the origin of the first feathers. I found this article particularly interesting for the mention of the endothermy-feather link, as it could explain why today's birds are endothermic, since dinosaurs with the most complex and developed feathers would have been the endothermic ones to retain heat better. This article contributed more detailed ideas about feather morphology, which creates some foundation for the next research article that I will describe in detail. The final article, “Additional Information on the Primitive Outline and Wing Plumage of Paravian Dinosaurs,” aimed to better understand the feather morphology of various dinosaurs to better understand their roles and evolution. Paravian dinosaurs are a group of therapods more closely related to birds than to oviraptosaurs. Several high-resolution photographs of non-avian and avian dinosaur taxa were taken using a Nikon D800 camera with a 60 or 105 mm Miko lens, taxa included Anchiornis, Sinosauropteryx, Confuciornis, Psittacosaurus, and Caudipteryx (Saitta et al. 2017). Anchiornis was a paravian taxon with contour feathers detached from the plumage, resulting in a shaggy appearance (Saitta et al. 2017). The contour feathers are what form the general shape of the therapod, hence the term "contour". Because of this open-winged structure, not only was Anchiornis flightless, but it also had a shaggy appearance, refer to Figure 1. These simplified open-winged feathers were also observed on Caudipteryx. Contour feathers have been shown to have evolved before flight, from observations made in Sinosauropteryx, and these contour feathers likely served functional roles such as thermoregulation and display, so it was found that understanding the evolution of contour feathers could provide information on the function of early birds. feathers. Psittocosaurus, however, had long bristle-like filaments that may have occurred in clusters, while Confusiornis had developed relatively more derived structures in its wing feathers. The tufts of Sinosauropteryx differed greatly from the contour feathers of Anchiornis, and the "bristly" morphology of Anchiornis shows how extinct morphologies make the linear evolution-developmental model of feather evolution difficult, as some of these feather structures appear derived while others appear to be ancestral. , which was actually stated in the article's conclusion: "Ultimately, truly 'modern' contour feathers may be relatively more derivative than originally thought." However, although feathers with open wings are incapable of flight, there is evidence that partially open ones may be able to glide,.12342.