[Dog Gone]

Where'd you get that from the story?

Dilong's protofeathers are not what we would recognise as feathers today, but are their evolutionary precursors. Rather than having a central shaft and barbs, they are single flexible filaments that would have covered the dinosaur's body like hair.

I have single flexible filaments on the top of my head.

[stands2reason]

The fuzz on chicks is single-filament -- likely they can tell the difference between the fossilized remains of mammal fur and chick "fuzz."

[Junior]

Good catch. There are some structural differences between hair and feathers, though, including the anchoring. IIRC from the "fighting dinosaurs" exhibit in 2000, feather attachments actually leave telltale marks on the skeleton.

Hair did develop from the same structure (scales) as feathers, but it developed in a branch of reptiles (not dinosaurs) that led to mammals and flying reptiles (yes, pteranadon had fur -- at least that's what a few Russian fossils indicate).