Birds Of A Feather

Carl Zimmer revisits one of evolution's "most durable mysteries" - the origin of feathers:

The closest living relatives of birds, dinosaurs, and pterosaurs are crocodilians. Although these scaly beasts obviously do not have feathers today, the discovery of the same gene in alligators that is involved in building feathers in birds suggests that perhaps their ancestors did, 250 million years ago, before the lineages diverged. So perhaps the question to ask, say some scientists, is not how birds got their feathers, but how alligators lost theirs.

2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan