How to pronounce“pycnofibers”in English

Some even doubt that the pycnofibers are for warmth.

But until this point, pycnofibers hadn’t been considered true feathers because they didn’t branch at all and didn’t look much the quills from dinosaurs.

Whatever the function, if these pycnofibers are truly feathers, then the origin of feathers happened a lot further back than paleontologists thought.

In this latest paper, the researchers literally put two pterosaur specimens from China under the microscope; they found four different forms of pycnofibers.