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T-rex, not only tasted like chicken, but looked the part

That article isn't actually about the T-Rex, but a related species.
 
It's close enough that it's likely that such a significant trait was shared by T. rex. I mean, feathers aren't exactly a trivial adaptation, and given how common they are in therapods it's likely that they all had feathers to some degree. And the hadrosaur herds T. rex is speculated to have followed migrated pretty far north as I recall, so feathers wouldn't be a bad thing to have.

That said, inter-specific variation would be an interesting thing to understand. What I mean is, yes T. rex almost certainly had feathers, but how many and where? Was it big and fluffy, or did it have a few spars feathers used for mating dances or something? And how does this relate to paleogeography? Were polar dinosaurs more feathered than their equitorial kin? We're starting to get to the point where we can answer these types of questions, and it's a very exciting time!
 
Says these beasties were about a quarter the weight of T-Rex. We're still talking a car on legs.

Emus always did freak me out.
 
How can they tell what color the feathers were? Did they make it through fossilization?
 
I protest against you, paleontologists, for turning the cool and fearsome reptilian carnivore beasts from my childhood in to mega chickens. Whats' next? Pink sauropods?

Yes, I once told that to a dinosaurlogist.
 
Correa Neto said:
I protest against you, paleontologists, for turning the cool and fearsome reptilian carnivore beasts from my childhood in to mega chickens. Whats' next? Pink sauropods?

Yes, I once told that to a dinosaurlogist.
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:p How'd that conversation end?

Tacita said:
How can they tell what color the feathers were? Did they make it through fossilization?
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Some, surprisingly, do. As I've said many times, "fossilization" isn't a singular process--there are many, many forms it can take. Preservation in amber is one such form, and as anyone who's seen a bug in amber knows such preservation can be nearly perfect. And in fact we've found feathers in amber. It's not that surprising, and everyone sort of assumed that they were bird feathers--until the stuff out of China and other locations proved that non-avian dinosaurs have feathers as well, at which point a lot of fossils were re-examined. Turns out we have some dinosaur feathers, and by "feathers" I mean the actual feather, not an impression.

There are a few other tricks, but I'm less certain about those. My experience is that paleontologists aren't necessarily up on taphonomy, which makes examination of such fine details open to extreme skepticism.
 
Dinwar said:
It's close enough that it's likely that such a significant trait was shared by T. rex. I mean, feathers aren't exactly a trivial adaptation, and given how common they are in therapods it's likely that they all had feathers to some degree. And the hadrosaur herds T. rex is speculated to have followed migrated pretty far north as I recall, so feathers wouldn't be a bad thing to have.

That said, inter-specific variation would be an interesting thing to understand. What I mean is, yes T. rex almost certainly had feathers...
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Not according to available physical evidence. Imprints of T-rex skin have been found, and show scaly skin without feathers.

However, since coding for feathers existed in a T-rex ancestor, it is not unlikely that dormant coding for feathers existed in T-rex, possibly expressed in some variation not yet yet discovered.
 
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Feather colors can be determined even from mineral fossils, not just feathers in amber. (In fact, it might even be more reliable, since complex carbon compounds can fall apart given enough time anyway.) The way it works is that feather color is determined by the shapes of microscopic structures in the feathers, and sometimes fossils have fine enough detail to see those shapes. A lot of fossil feathers don't allow this, so we know the colors of some dinosaurs' feathers (or at least the feathers on certain parts of their bodies), but not others.
 
Toontown said:
Not according to available physical evidence. Imprints of T-rex skin have been found, and show scaly skin without feathers.
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It's a basic truism of paleontology that the absence of evidence shouldn't be taken as evidence for absence. I mean, I know of no fossils of the Titanocarcinus genus from the deep Atlantic, yet I'm certain, given the other evidence I've seen, that there were some members of the genus that lived in the area.

When it comes to plumage, I'd be hesitant to rely too much on skin impressions that don't include it. Too many questions remain. What areas of the body do these impressions record (I know of no full-body skin impressions)? What are the gaps when we put them all together? What environmental conditions were these organisms preserved in? What was the rock they were preserved in (coarse-grained material [relatively speaking] wouldn't preserve feather impressions anyway)? And so on. And I've never said that T. rexes were covered with feathers, either. It could be the have very few feathers, used for displays of one sort or another. Or it could be something entirely alien to us--dinosaurs have done that often enough.

Really, all we can say is "We have yet to find feathers on a T. rex specimen, and skin impressions suggest areas unlikely to have had feathers". And given the number of therapods that DID have feathers, I'm still pretty confident that T. rex did. Plumage seems to be a pretty early development in therapods.
 
Dinwar said:
:p How'd that conversation end?
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I guess that rolling eyes emoticon would sum it up pretty well...
But I also guess my feelings are shared by other people...
BTW, just remembered to have seen pink sauropod reconstructions. Firts the mega chickens and then the overgrown "my little poneys".
There's nothing sacred for you paleontologists?
 
One of the paleontologists I used to share an office with collects My Little Poneys. Always wondered why she went into echinoderm studies, rather than Tertiary/Quaternary mammals. She was a lot of fun.

I've always wondered about those kinds of reconstructions. They're visually striking, but ecologically stupid. I mean, frogs have that sort of coloring, because they're poisonous enough to get away with it. Birds are brightly colored because of sexual selection. But you look at large herbivores and none of them are brightly colored. Antelope, deer, and the like tend towards tan. Bison are dark brown. Cows are spotted, but that's because we bred them to be. Zebras and giraffs are about as eye-popping as you get, and neither one is pink. Reconstructions should use more of Call of Duty's color pallet than the Covanent in Halo, and for the same reason: herbivores are food. Things like to eat them. Sure, a sauropod doesn't have to worry too much about it, but the same could be said about a bison and they're pretty drab color-wise.
 
That could be because the examples we have today are mammals and mammal fur seems to only have one or two kinds of pigment that happen to be brown and gray; even species in which you might expect more color (like monkeys) still don't get it, which could be a sign that our skin & fur just aren't good at doing colors. Some mammalian prey herbivores such as gazelles and okapis seem to be trying to do as much as they can to stand out, within a limited set of colors to choose from.
 
If we compare dinosaur with birds we still have the same problem. Maybe the males would be a bit more brightly colored (that depends on the species), but the females of almost all bird species are more drab than the males. We know it's not a pigment issue--peacocks are rainbows to the peahen's earth tones, for example. And the large flightless birds we have simply aren't that colorful. If we compare it with large lizards we come to the same conclusion. While there are some with bright coloring, the overwhelming majority are earth tones and those that DO have bright coloring tend to have it in relatively limited regions, where it acts to break up the outline of the body. Again, we know it's not a pigment thing--smaller lizards and snakes certainly can be brightly colored. Coloration largely has to do with cryptocoloration, the ability to hide from other giant beasts. In general, in nature you blend in unless there's a very good reason not to.
 
On the subject of coloration, it may also be true that there is coloring that is useful in youth when size is smaller (and odds of being prey are higher) and then simply not lost as the creature grows larger.

I remember reading about at least some fossilized dinosaur skins whose scale shapes varied subtly in the same way as scales of contemporary lizards--shapes that indicated colors. So the researchers tentatively concluded that the dinosaurs were striped and of fairly bright color. (If I rediscover the article, I'd add a link.)

It is worth noting that among today's birds, it is more common for bright plumage to be a feature of adults, not adolescents.

Bring on the fluffy Rex!! I'm all for it!

And while I don't know about pink sauropods, it's quite likely that some of the large marine pterosaurs were pink, for the same reason that spoonbills and flamingoes are: They eat a lot of iodine-containing food! I am enchanted at the idea of a pink feathered toothy horror with a 14 foot wingspan...but maybe that's just me.
 
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