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Dinosaurs now have feathers

Snorkio

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So the recent discoveries in paleontology have been showing that there is evidence that birds descended from dinosaurs, birds have feathers, and some dinosaurs have feathers.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/07/140724-feathered-siberia-dinosaur-scales-science/
There is one discovery discussed in this article of one non-Raptor dinosaur species, Kulindadromeus, that likely had feathers or some sort of plumage in addition to scales.

I have observed that there is kind of self-satisfied contrarian narrative that all the dinosaur imagery many adults grew up with, of large, scaly lizard-like beasts is therefore wrong. Snickering criticism of the Jurassic Park film being an example of that.

I get that it's always fun to be a critic.

But I would wonder if anyone knows more about the current state of the research in this field and whether this view is actually accepted broadly? (not talking about birds being descendent from dinos, but whether all dinos had feathers)

For instance, even as a layman, I know that in the American Museum of Natural History there is a Fossilized duck-billed dinosaur including some of the soft tissue, which when I saw it did not appear to have feathers, and was described as having hexagonal shaped scales on its skin iirc. The exhibit definitely did not mention feathers when I was there in Dec, 2014 (after the nat geo article above).

In the Museum of the Rockies, in their excellent dinosaur exhibit they have a sculpture of a dinosaur with feathers attacking another dinosaur without feathers.

So given the evidence for feathers appears to be rare. Why jump to conclusions?
Shouldn't we expect many more fossil imprints to show some sort of feathers, if they all had them?
Why does one of the famous examples of petrified dinosaur skin, not appear to have feathers?
 
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Gawdzilla Sama said:
How many birds are featherless?
Click to expand...

What's that have to do with anything? The dinosaur family tree branched before feathers evolved. All birds are evolved from feathered dinosaurs, but not all dinosaurs were. There's no evidence of feathered sauropods for example.
 
My post explained why only certain types of dinosaurs had feathers. Yours, I still don't get the point of.
 
phunk said:
My post explained why only certain types of dinosaurs had feathers. Yours, I still don't get the point of.
Click to expand...

There's only one type of dinosaurs alive. They all have feathers. I think the idea would be to prove that some dinosaurs didn't have feathers. Otherwise the default would be "dinosaurs had feathers."

(And I actually doubt that myself somewhat, because I don't think the earthshakers needed feathers to keep warm. The young ones, maybe, but seismosaurus, not so much.)
 
Gawdzilla Sama said:
There's only one type of dinosaurs alive. They all have feathers. I think the idea would be to prove that some dinosaurs didn't have feathers. Otherwise the default would be "dinosaurs had feathers."

(And I actually doubt that myself somewhat, because I don't think the earthshakers needed feathers to keep warm. The young ones, maybe, but seismosaurus, not so much.)
Click to expand...
Seismosaurus did not need feathers to keep warm, it needed them to fly! Can you imagine a seismosaur flying without feathers? That would be absurd.
 
Gawdzilla Sama said:
There's only one type of dinosaurs alive. They all have feathers.
Click to expand...
And they came from a branch that split from the dinosaur family tree 165 million years before they went extinct. And feathers evolved after that branch. There is no reason to expect sauropods to have feathers.
I think the idea would be to prove that some dinosaurs didn't have feathers. Otherwise the default would be "dinosaurs had feathers."
Click to expand...

There are lots of skin impressions of sauropods, none have anything resembling feathers.
 
phunk said:
And they came from a branch that split from the dinosaur family tree 165 million years before they went extinct. And feathers evolved after that branch. There is no reason to expect sauropods to have feathers.
Click to expand...
They wouldn't evolve feathers then?

There are lots of skin impressions of sauropods, none have anything resembling feathers.
Click to expand...
So far.
 
Snorkio said:
So given the evidence for feathers appears to be rare. Why jump to conclusions?
Shouldn't we expect many more fossil imprints to show some sort of feathers, if they all had them?
Why does one of the famous examples of petrified dinosaur skin, not appear to have feathers?
Click to expand...

As a child, I have seen skin casts of hadrosaur (duckbill) dinosaurs in the New York Museum of Natural History. That was about 40 years ago. I recently saw more hadrosaur skin at another museum in another state. Again, it had no feathers. So the same question occurred to me recently.

I did a little googling. My research confirmed that scientists believe that some non avian dinosaurs had feathers. Or at least they had structures similar to feathers. However, scientists believe that only some species of non avian dinosaurs had feather-like structures.

There is general agreement that most but not all theropod species had structures that were homologous to feathers. However, very few species had feathers precisely like a birds feathers. Some prefer to use the word protofeathers rather than feathers, since many of them can be considered primitive precursors to feathers. Many theropods had merely the shaft, making them functionally like quills rather than feathers.

There now are available a lot of theropod fossils with protofeathers. Not all the skin casts in theropods show fossils, but many do. So the conventional wisdom that theropods had protofeathers. Most of these protofeathers are considered more primitive than true feathers, so there is a taxonomy problem here. There are only a few theropods that that had fully bird like feathers. However, there was definitely more than one theropod that had feathers as fully developed as extant birds.

Theropods are a family within the order saurischian. Saurischians include the sauropod family. Sauropods includes brontosaurus. So for a long while, scientists have been looking for feathers in sauropods. However, sauropods have not left as many skin casts as hadrosaurs. So we still don’t have any evidence that sauropods either had or didn’t have feathers.


There is some skeletal evidence that sauropods pneumatic lungs. Pneumatic lungs are a feature that is unique among extant birds. So there is a ‘bird connection’ to sauropods


Hadrosaurs are a family within the order ornithischians. While some ornithischians are not hadrosaurs, Triceratops is an ornithischian but not a hadrosaur. However, some scientists extrapolated the case of hadrosaurs to the other ornisthischians. So until recently it was believed that ornithischians didn’t have feathers.

There is general agreement that most but not all theropods had structures that were homologous to feathers. However, very species had feathers precisely like a birds feathers. Some prefer to use the word protofeathers rather than feathers, since many of them can be considered primitive precursors to feathers. Many early dinosaurs had merely the shaft, making them functionally like quills rather than feathers.

https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2009/03/19/blah-blah-feathered-ornithischians-yawn/
‘Blah blah feathered ornithischians*yawn’

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090318/full/news.2009.172.html
‘A primitive form of feather may have evolved much earlier than was previously thought, according to an analysis of a dinosaur fossil that is more than 100 million years old. The specimen supports arguments that dinosaurs may have used feathers for display.
…
All previous feathered theropods belong to the saurischian order, whereas the new fossil belongs to the ornithischian.
…
The find "pulls the origin of feathers down into the Triassic, when the saurischian and ornithischian lineages of dinosaurs split", says Philip Currie at the University of Alberta in Canada.’

This fossil may be the ‘missing link’ between Ornithischians and Saurischians. It is not a theropod. However, it is not a hadrosaur. One could very roughly call it a transition fossil. If it is not the most recent common ancestor of Ornithischians and Saurischians, it is close to it.


I think the current conjecture may be that all saurischians either have feathers or protofeathers. The most recent common ancestor of Saurischians and Ornithischians possibly had protofeathers of some sort. However, hadrosaurs probably didn’t have feathers.
 
Snorkio said:
So given the evidence for feathers appears to be rare. Why jump to conclusions?
Shouldn't we expect many more fossil imprints to show some sort of feathers, if they all had them?
Why does one of the famous examples of petrified dinosaur skin, not appear to have feathers?
Click to expand...

Here is a review article that provides what is basically the current research on which dinosaurs had and did not have feathers.

http://observationdeck.kinja.com/a-comprehensive-guide-to-dinosaur-feathers-and-scales-1603368757
‘A Comprehensive Guide to Dinosaur Feathers and Scales’


So it appears hadrosaurs and sauropods had no feathers.
Most small theropods had feathers.
Tyrannosaurs: maybe?

And there are no extant birds without feathers. Unless you count the crocodile as birds!
 
Darwin123 said:
Here is a review article that provides what is basically the current research on which dinosaurs had and did not have feathers.

http://observationdeck.kinja.com/a-comprehensive-guide-to-dinosaur-feathers-and-scales-1603368757
‘A Comprehensive Guide to Dinosaur Feathers and Scales’


So it appears hadrosaurs and sauropods had no feathers.
Most small theropods had feathers.
Tyrannosaurs: maybe?

And there are no extant birds without feathers. Unless you count the crocodile as birds!
Click to expand...
That is an educatational link. Thanks
 
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