The chicken-sized carnivore is the first feathered dino fossil found in the Southern Hemisphere
The fossil of a chicken-sized, meat eater from Brazil that had a mane of fluffy filaments and a pair of stiff, ribbon-like streamers emerging from both shoulders is the first dinosaur with feathers ever discovered in the Southern Hemisphere.The name Ubirajara means “lord of the spear”’ and comes from the local Tupi Indigenous language, while jubatus comes from the Latin for maned or crested.
Many dinosaurs from the supercontinent of Gondwana, which covered much of the southern half of the planet during the Cretaceous Period, were assumed to have had feathers, but it’s exciting to finally have direct evidence, says study coauthor David Martill, a paleontologist at the University of Portsmouth in England.
