Hairy Museum of Natural History

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• Epidexipteryx hui
  Credit: Zhao Chuang & Xing Lida.

• New Dinosaur: Epidexipteryx hui
• Name Means: Yaoming Hu’s Display Feather
• Relations: Scansoripterygid Avialaean
• Holotype: IVPP V15471, skeleton preserved with feather impressions.
• Location: Inner Mongolia, northern China
• Age: ?Middle to Late Jurassic, somewhere between 152,000,000 to 168,000,000 years ago
• Info: The well-preserved skeleton of little Epidexipteryx shows that this pigeon-sized dinosaur was covered in a fluffy feather coat, although it did not possess any contour feathers that would have enabled it to fly. It did, however sport two pairs of long ribbon-like plumes that fanned out from the tip of its rather short tail, presumably used for some sort of display. Other interesting features include its enlarged, forward-curving front teeth and its unusually proportioned hip bones. Its describers suggest that Epidexipteryx was related to the long-fingered Epidendrosaurus, and that these unusual little dinosaurs are examples of a previously unknown diversity of theropods near the origin of birds.
• Reference: F. Zhang, Z. Zhou, X. Xu, X. Wang and C. Sullivan, 2008. A bizarre Jurassic maniraptoran from China with elongate ribbon-like feathers Nature 455: 1105-1108.
• Elsewhere on the Web:
  • Nature: Figures and Tables
  • Palaeoblog: Epidexipteryx, Jurassic Feathered Dinosaur
  • Catalog of Organisms: A New Stem-Bird and Publication in the Digital Age
  • BBC News: New Feathered Dinosaur Discovered
  • Dave Hone’s Archosaur Musings has a guest post by one of the describers of Epidexipteryx, Corwin Sullivan: The Vampire Peacock of Daohugou

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Dinosaurs, Jurassic.