CHINESE UNCOVER REMAINS OF FEATHERED DINOSAUR.

Byline: Associated Press

Chinese paleontologists have found the remains of a 121 million-year-old feathered dinosaur, providing what could be the most graphic evidence yet that birds are descended from the prehistoric titans.

Photographs of the fossilized creature show an unmistakable downy stripe running down its back. If the feathered dinosaur is confirmed, said paleontologists who have seen the fossil, then it provides almost irrefutable evidence that today's birds evolved from dinosaurs.

``As soon as they showed me the specimen, it just blew me away,'' said Phil Currie, a paleontologist who recently saw the fossil in Beijing. ``You can't come to any conclusion other than that they're feathers.''

Nobody has ever found feathers on anything other than a bird. So the feathered fossil provides further ammunition for the already widely accepted theory that dinosaurs gave rise to birds. That theory is now based mostly on the similarity in shape of bird hip bones to those of one dinosaur group.

``This is not a bird, but it does have feathers,'' said Luis Chiappe of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. ``So the people who resist the dinosaur origin of birds will have a hard time explaining this.''

On Thursday, Chen Pei-Ji of the Nanjing Paleontology Institute showed photographs of the fossil at the American Museum of Natural History, where the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology is holding its annual meeting. The photographs show the flattened remains of a birdlike beast splayed out on a slab of rock, it's neck twisted backward at an agonizing angle.

Arrayed down the dinosaur's back, from the nape of its neck to the tip of its tail, is what appears to be a row of feathers that have left their impression in the rock.