They Had Feathers: Is the World Ready to See Dinosaurs as They Really Were?

[Omaha Steve]

https://www.allaboutbirds.org/they-had-feathers-is-the-world-ready-to-see-dinosaurs-as-they-really-were-2/?utm_source=Cornell%20Lab%20eNews&utm_campaign=9338018069-Cornell_Lab_eNews_2016_05_10&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_47588b5758-9338018069-302623569


In last summer’s Jurassic World movie, a pack of scaly velociraptors chased a man on a motorcycle.

There are two possible reactions to this scene. One, if you are among the blockbuster’s wider audience: Wow! Those dinosaurs look like they’re alive! Or two, if you are a paleontologist or a dinosaur-obsessed kid: Wait a minute. Those are too big to be velociraptors. And why are they covered with scales?

Dinosaurs have been getting slowly more birdlike for decades—perhaps not in mainstream depictions, but at least in the minds of paleontologists. This is thanks to three pioneers: the late John Ostrom of Yale, who discovered a fossil called Deinonychus in 1964 and hypothesized that it was warm blooded; John McLaughlin, a brilliant illustrator, science fiction writer, and scientist, who suggested that many dinosaurs were feathered and warm blooded in a 1979 book called Archosauria; and perhaps most memorable, Robert Bakker, a bearded, ponytailed paleontologist, who was once called a “fossil-junkie genius, the Galileo of paleontology.” He liked to describe Tyrannosaurus rex as “the 20,000 pound roadrunner from Hell.”

Now, thanks to troves of new fossil discoveries, those paleontologists and dinosaur-obsessed kids don’t just think but know: “Dinosaurs had feathers!” And not just hairy kiwi-style feathers, but complex, asymmetrical vaned ones, like the flight feathers of modern birds. This new thinking has been spurred on by discoveries of exquisitely detailed fossils in deposits of fine-textured lithographic limestone.

FULL story at link.

[LiberalEsto]

1. I bet they tasted just like chicken!

[silvershadow]

4. Well, actually they were a little "gamey".

[hobbit709]

22. Chicken tastes like lizard.

[madinmaryland]

25. When breeding it, use corn flakes!!

It's dinosaur fer chrissakes!!

[LiberalEsto]

26. That sounds kinky

Breeding dinosaurs with corn flakes?

Why not panko?

[malaise]

2. Cool

Rec

[Warpy]

3. Considering chickens are now known to be close relatives of Tyrranosaurus Rex

I honestly think most of them had some form of plumage, even if it was a Mohawk of them down the back of a Stegosaurus or a ruff around the neck or showy display at the end of the tail. The last thing I think dinosaurs were is olive drab and scaly. It just doesn't compute. After all, even contemporary lizards have a huge range of color and adornment.

Mother Nature tends to like bling.

[Scootaloo]

29. Er, well...

Sort of. All birds are equally close to Tyrannosaurs, as both birds and tyrannosaurs are both part of the Coelurosauria clade. They're not particularly close, as there are a few more clades to go to get to birds (maniraptora, avialae, euornithes, and finally aves). And a chicken in particular is no closer to a T-rex than a hummingbird is to an ornithomimus. In fact, chickenlike birds (galliformes) may have existed at the same time as tyrannosaurs were stomping around.

Also, there is evidence that ornithosuchans had feathers as well, or at least featherlike structures. It may have been a "crown archosaur" thing rather than a "therapod" or even "dinosaur" thing. Pterosaurs had some sort of "fuzzy" covering, but there's no evidence that crocodiles ever did.

As for their coloration... well... Birds are the closest relatives to dinosaurs we know of, and they tend to be pretty colorful. Even the "drab" ones might be more colorful than we know, because birds are tetrachromats - they see four primary colors, as opposed to humans' three (and most mammal's two, or non-color vision.) That is, boring-looking birds might have colors and patterns going on that we just can't perceive.

We don't know how most dinosaurs were colored (we've actually used molecular structrues in finer fossiels to deduce the coloring and patterns of some dinosaur feathers) but we can almost certainly assume they were also tetrachromatic seers; birds and crocodiles both are, and those are the guys at the front and back of archosaur evolution. Almost all reptiles are tetrachromats, barring some nocturnal lizards and snakes. Turtles and tuataras are even pentachromats. So basically, all reptiles, aside from individual species, have color vision at least as strong as ours, and are likely to have evolved colors and patterns in kind with this ability.

We can guess that dinosaurs would have followed the environmental color scheme we see in all animals though - the warmer the environment, the brighter and more varied the colors.

[Archae]

5. Well, "Archae" is an anthropomorphic archaeopteryx...

[NV Whino]

6. Hmm, maybe I should stop feeding the birds.

And to think I've been blaming the raccoons for all the destruction.

[Egnever]

15. .

[Ron Obvious]

7. Once you know this, you can never see them the same way again

?zz=1

C'mon, it's a plucked chicken.

[lagomorph777]

24. It looks so...naked

I feel a little embarrassed.

[cigsandcoffee]

8. So they're just up there. On the wire. Waiting. n/t

[Octafish]

14. Watching.

Don't park your clean car anywhere near them either -- especially a convertible.

[trudyco]

9. Dragons /nt

[XemaSab]

10. I loved this article

[suffragette]

11. I imagine the mating dances must have been spectacular

https://m.

[uppityperson]

12. Superb bird rules

It could be different, but that's how the black with bright blue bird name sounds to me.

[suffragette]

13. That's my fav, too. Here's a better video of the Superb bird of paradise.

http://www.pbs.org/video/1756843728/

[KelleyKramer]

16. Great article, thanks for posting!

Very interesting, opens up all kind of doors (or windows?)

[muriel_volestrangler]

17. Aarrggh!! Would it have killed the author to name the most important find he's talking about?

Even way over on the other side of the dinosaur evolutionary tree, the group known as the Ornithischia was probably birdlike too. A recently discovered fossil of a very early small dinosaur shows clearly that it had at least kiwi or Emu-type feathers, if not complex feathers like modern birds. The fossil dates from more than 200 million years ago, meaning it must resemble the ancestor of all dinos, Ornithischia and Saurischia alike. Its pelt seems to show that the earliest dinosaurs emerged from the Triassic with a warm covering and did not look like lizards at all; actually, they looked an awful lot like kiwis.

Now, this is the important bit, because Ornithischia covers a huge amount of the dinosaurs - Stegosaurus, Ankylosaurus, Iguanodon, Triceratops and so on. The earliest split in the dinosaur family tree was between Ornithischia and Saurischia. So something from early Ornithischia is really important.

Bu he doesn't even name it! We have Kulindadromeus, which I started a thread on here a couple of years ago, from about 170 to 150 million years ago, Tianyulong from about the same period, and later Psittacosaurus from the Cretaceous. But now the author casually says there's one that's over 200 million years old, but doesn't say what it is! Just "a very early small dinosaur".

If you want to say 'dinosaurs in general had feathers', then finding yet more feathered theropods is not interesting. It's the other branches that are still uncertain.

[Recursion]

19. Stegosaurus stenops

One thing I wish I'd really learned in high school biology was that more years separate S stenops from T rex than separate T rex from H sapiens. Kind of changes your whole perspective...

[ChisolmTrailDem]

31. That cannot be right because I know have seen a T-Rex and a Stegosaur...

...on the Land of the Lost TV show way back when.

[Warren DeMontague]

18. Best part?

They probably tasted like Chicken.

[roamer65]

33. I wonder how they taste with some sweet and sour sauce. N/t

[Javaman]

20. of course they did...

I always thought that the way dinosaurs were traditionally presented, looked like plucked chickens.

[sofa king]

21. I wonder if they were using ground effect?

Wings and a tail like the suni above might not be able to fly, but could they generate enough lift to hover over the forest floor, so that they could silently attack from 30 or more feet away? Some sea-birds do it, I see from time to time.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/55562?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_effect_(aerodynamics)

I might just mention this to the folks in the lab....

[FLPanhandle]

23. Reminds me of this classic

[cagefreesoylentgreen]

27. .

There's a nicer ring to "The dinosaurs crapped all over my car again" versus "The birds crapped all over my car again."

But yeah, if you've ever spent some time living around a parrot, I doubt you'd question the dinosaur-bird link.

[FLPanhandle]

28. Welcome to DU

[Scootaloo]

30. I'm a big fan of "fatbird" dinosaurs

wok wok WOO!

[Norrin Radd]

32. That T-Rex is the best

thing I've seen in a long time.