Dave Hone

No, they've been knocking around forever.

They just survived because they're small.

In a very large part, yeah.

That's almost certainly what really helped them.

But birds took a kicking in the Cate extinction.

So did mammals.

Loads of bird lineages went extinct, and only a handful got over the line, but they did.

But yeah, we have feathers in, as I said, we've got middle Jurassic Tyrannosaurs that are 165 million years old, so 100 million years before the extinction, that have feathers.

Simple feathers, they'd be like those you get on most baby chicks, so they're not with the big kind of classic pick-up-a-feather in the street or on a field of the big vein up the middle and then the kind of paired flat pieces.

This would be much more like a hare, but we have them.

We've got something which is very close to a bird but might not quite be a bird with modern feathers.

In the Middle Jurassic, we've got definitive stuff like Archaeopteryx in the Late Jurassic.

And then into the Early Cretaceous, we have a series of fossil beds in China which are just heaving with them.

So yeah, and there's...

Tyrannosaurs have feathers.

Velociraptor and the dromaeosaurs had feathers.

Troodontids had feathers.

Ornithomimosaurs, we've mentioned, they had feathers.

And so did a whole bunch of other groups as well.

There's about eight or nine kind of major groups, kind of the size of something like, yeah, literally like carnivores or...