Feathered Life follows the history of birds and dinosaurs through a series of spectacular successes and great catastrophes across some 250 million years of the Earth's history. Traditionally, similar histories have confined themselves to interpretations of variations in bones and a few other morphological features. That evidence has proven somewhat treacherous. In particular, gaps in the fossil record of very small species have weakened our knowledge of dinosaurs. Even modern studies of skeletal variation in living birds have failed to produce wholly reliable family trees.