Body coverings such as hair and feathers have played a central role in evolution. They enabled warm-bloodedness by insulating the body, and were used for courtship, display, deterrence of enemies and, in the case of feathers, flight. Their structure is characterised by longer and more complex skin outgrowths that differ significantly from the simple and flat scales of reptiles. Complex skin outgrowths have previously only been observed in mammals in the form of hair and in birds and their closest fossil relatives, dinosaurs and pterosaurs, in the form of feathers. An international team led by palaeontologists Dr Stephan Spiekman and Prof Dr Rainer Schoch from the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart, Germany, describes a previously unknown tree-dwelling reptile from the early Middle Triassic in a recent study published in the prestigious journal Nature. The 247-million-year-old reptile ‘Mirasaura grauvogeli’, whose name means ‘Grauvogel’s Wonder Reptile’, had a dorsal crest with p