Did all dinosaurs have feathers?
http://www.tgdaily.com/general-sciences-features/64439-did-all-dinosaurs-have-feathers
My, how times have changed! When I was a kid, dinosaurs were cold-blooded, slow, lumbering beasts that dragged their tails. Now they are warm blooded, fast, agile and hold their tails up high, and, it seems, covered in colorful feathers! One of the big conundrums with explaining the evolution of birds was how the heck did something as complex as a feather come into being when it was so difficult to imagine feathers as any sort of survival characteristic until flight was well developed. Over the last decade in a half or so theories have emerged (and been supported by fossil data) that many therapod-type dinosaurs (the most bird-like) had extensive feathers. There was also some evidence that wings did evolve in several steps and some plausible theories (supported by observed activity with modern birds) that even without the ability of full flight that having proto-wings would be survival oriented (using wings a bit like a net to capture prey as well as having the (very short-term) ability to ‘leap’ up if attacked or to leap up to capture insects (which have been flying for a really long time)). Now, as seems increasingly likely, many many dinosaurs were covered in feathers, then it will have been something that is very plausible to have evolved gradually over time rather than requiring a bunch of head scratching and intellectual leaps of faith.
That is the way of science. No matter how great your story is, how well it hangs together, how plausible or appealing it is, without physical evidence it is nothing more than a campfire story. Now, at least regarding birds, we have evidence that is firming up and we can move this from the campfire realm into the text books.
