Did dinosaurs have feathers?

We know that dinosaurs evolved from reptiles, and they are the ancestors of today's birds. From films like {Jurassic Park}, one gets the impression of giant crocodiles. But perhaps some dinosaurs, at least, might have been closer to birds.
The picture by Ryan McKellar of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Canada shows the tail of a 100 crore year old dinosaur (a young coelurosaur), found preserved in amber (along with an ant and other material) in 2015. The amber comes from a mine in Kachin state in northern Myanmar (Burma). The expedition was led by Lida Xing of the China University of Geosciences. The second picture is a micro-CT scan of the feathers by Lida Xing. Coelurosaurs (Greek for "hollow-tailed lizards") are supposed to have evolved towards maniraptors, which includes birds.
Some feathers were found with the bones of a dinosaur called {Archaeopteryx}, which has led to its being called an ancestor of birds. It was later shown that the feathers and the bones belonged to different animals.

Could it fly?
Many animals have feathers, but they do not all fly. The specimen shows eight tail vertebrae (bones). In modern birds like a hen or a turkey, the tail vertebrae are all fused together, with shafts, branches, sub-branches and hooks that latch. So the tail feathers can move as a single unit, which is important for the birds' flight.
The dinosaur feathers appear to keel to either side of the tail. Their open structure is similar to modern ornamental feathers than to flight feathers. If the entire length of the dinosaur tail was covered in the type of feathers seen in the amber sample, the dinosaur would not have flown. The feathers could have been used for signalling, or have played a role in temperature regulation.

Fossils in amber
The researchers found the amber fashioned into jewelry at sale in a market in Myitkyina, a city in Myanmar. It had already been shaped into an oval. Because the dinosaur's tail had been cut in this reshaping, the scientists could do a chemical analysis. This revealed the presence of iron, which would have been produced from the haemoglobin which was present in the dinosaur's blood and was preserved in some of its tissue.
Amber is fossilized tree resin, a sticky plant secretion which protects them from pests. On occasion these pests, such as the ant in the first picture, get stuck in the resin and are frozen for crores of years. The third picture, also by Ryan McKellar, shows 8 crore year old dinosaur feathers, trapped in amber from Grassy Lake in Alberta in Canada.
McKellar said that soft tissue and decayed blood from the tail were found in the amber but no genetic material was preserved. Scientist Lida Xing is optimistic. "Maybe we can find a complete dinosaur," he speculates.