In the second stage, the filament has turned into a cluster of ‘barbs’. In a modern feather, the barbs branch off from a central stalk or ‘rachis’ but at this stage of feather evolution, the rachis doesn’t exist yet. Instead, the barbs all emerge from a shared base. They’re closest to the fuzz of Sinornithosaurus, another feathered meat-eating dinosaur – possibly venomous, and one of the earliest members of the group that included Velociraptor and Deinonychus.