there are many dogmas on the theory of evolution, I am wishing to collect the information on the evolution of feather. the old time birds may be least known about "flying" later due to development in their cells of both the sides they got a sense to act with the expanded skin at their sides and later they started to get it up and down, may be they practiced for several years. changes takes place into their overall "survival of the fittest" and finally they got a power to fly in a big sky without the boundaries. So question fall in my mind the feathers who are helpful for the birds to fly on and on, how the evolution of feathers takes place?

Can you give me some good reasons and illustrations that the evolution of feathers was so essential for the birds and really it takes place on their overall development of their outlook.

According to the fossil record, some of the later dinosaurs had feathers.

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Check your local library for Dinosaurs of the Air: The Evolution and Loss of Flight in Dinosaurs and Birds by Gregory S. Paul. It's rather technical, but he writes well enough that a layperson (such as myself) can still understand the subject.

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My layman's understanding is that feathers evolved just for ornamentation. It makes sense. Modern birds continue to have some of the most complex mating rituals.

I think I've read that wings in insects are thought to have originally been involved in cooling.

Evolution can be that way; something usefull for one purpose can become used for another.

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My understanding was feathers evolved as a cooling/heating mechinism first, becoming ornamental later, to replace the blulkier cooling back plates or neck line plates some dino's had.

Small amounts of blood flowed through each feather, if the dinosaur was hot, it would fluff the feathers out allowing air to pass over them, cooling the blood. Likewise if it was cold, it could flatten them out in sunlight, and heat up thier blood, as well as preventing heat loss from thier skin.

As dino's started to evolve smaller, the feathers became less needful for heating/cooling, and became more ornamental, then eventualy led to some using feather covered limbs as a way to extend jumps, then later on glide, and eventually flight.

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There was an article about feather development in Scientific American sometime in the last few years, based on what can be seen of feather structure in fossils and what is known about how feathers physiologically develop on each individual modern bird as (s)he matures. It's roughly a case of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, so the stages in development of a modern bird's feathers represent the final, mature forms of the feathers on some of their ancestors and early cousins, as shown in fossils.

In the first stage, feathers are like diapsids' version of fur: long, slender, and unbranched. For a long time, this is all that any bird ancestors and their relatives had. But they're also conical and hollow, and that becomes the key difference in the next stage.

One side of the hollow cone splits from bottom to tip so that a cross section anywhere along the way becomes more like a "C" instead of an "O". Other splits develop out from that long one, perpendicular to it, slicing the cone into many of those separate "C" cross-sections. Those layers remain joined to each other only at the only part of the original hollow cone that doesn't get split: the side opposite from the original long split, forming an intact line from base to tip of what's left of the cone. Since this line from bottom to tip, passing through the midpoint of the "C" of each layer along the way, is the only part of the original cone left intact and holding the pieces together, it becomes the central shaft and rachis of the feather. The arms of each "C" layer open up and flatten out, and then the familiar form of a feather is recognizable: a flat shape consisting of many thin filaments extending in two opposite directions from a thick central shaft.

Again, that's as far as the feathers of many bird ancestors and their relatives got, and it's the first "truly feathery feather" to develop on new hatchlings of modern species after they outgrow the "unbranched hairlike pseudofeather" stage. But at this stage, it's only a down feather, a nifty soft insulator but not so good for flight or protection. The filaments grow parallel to each other but aren't attached, so they can fray apart easily, and the feather is straight and symmetrical. A later stage, found in adult flying birds' feathers (and perhaps indispensable even for the most rudimentary flight), introduces nearly microscopic barbs that extend from one filament to another to hook them together so the shape is retained more effectively.

Another later development introduces asymmetry in flight feathers, with the filaments on one side much longer/shorter than those on the other side and/or a curved central shaft. Archeopteryx did not have this yet, but modern flying birds do when they grow up.

feathers- like anything else ever evolved in any animal or plant that has ever existed on earth- came about as a random mutation that got passed around because the creatures that had them survived to mate and pass those genes onto their young. eventually, these creatures started jump, and the creature that could jump the farthest- perhaps by gliding- was able to get away from predators and pass on those genes to the next generation. throw in a few million random mutations that just happened to be beneficial, and over hundreds of millions of years, you get what we have today.
in nature, there is no "plan". just a bunch of random mutations that turn out to be beneficial or not beneficial. and feathers have been very beneficial to a lot of creatures.

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