Ubirajara Jubatus
What is it & Why in News?
- About 110 million years ago along the shores of an ancient lagoon in what is now northeastern Brazil, a two-legged chicken-sized Cretaceous Period dinosaur made a living hunting insects and perhaps small vertebrates like frogs and lizards.
- This dinosaur, called Ubirajara jubatus, possessed a mane of hair-like structures while also boasting two utterly unique, stiff, ribbon-like features probably made of keratin — the same substance that makes up hair and fingernails — protruding from its shoulders.
- Ubirajara’s hair-like structures appear to be a rudimentary form of feathers called protofeathers.
- This was not actual hair, an exclusively mammalian feature.
- Many dinosaurs had feathers.
- In fact, birds evolved from small feathered dinosaurs about 150 million years ago.
