Abstract
The primary feathers on the hind limbs of Microraptor give us an important clue about the nature of the ‘feather scleritome’. The Microraptor morphogenetic field hosts four curved projections representing the animal’s limbs. This is the case for all tetrapods. Like the bot fly larva, but in reverse, the extra sclerites/enations (maggot spines versus primary feather primordia, respectively) are on the trailing edge of a transverse bulge of the body rather than the leading edge of the bulge (anterior edge larval segment versus posterior edge of limb, respectively). Birds surely passed through an ancestral stage (Tetrapteryx) that developed the hind limbs as wing-like structures and, in accord with Goethe’s Law of Compensation, feathering on the hind limbs was reduced as the lineage relied more and more on their forelimbs for powered flight.
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McMenamin, M.A.S. (2018). Tetrapteryx. In: Deep Time Analysis. Springer Geology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74256-4_9
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