The popular image of dinosaurs – gray, dull, and scaly – has remained unchanged for decades. But new evidence over the last few years suggests a completely different picture. Did dinosaur feathers really exist?
Dinosaur Feathers – Did they Exist?
Well, yes, it appears at least some dinosaurs were covered with colorful feathers. First, there was the Dilong paradoxus. Then there were those 11 dinosaurs feathers found in western Canada. Now, scholars claim that Yutyrannus huali, a distant predecessor to Tyrannosaurus Rex, sported a full set of feathers as well. Here’s more on dinosaur feathers from Wired:
It’s not your father’s tyrannosaur: Yutyrannus huali, a newly discovered ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex, was covered from head to tail in downy feathers. At 30 feet long and weighing 3,000 pounds, Y. huali wasn’t so large as T. rex, which came 60 million years later, but it’s the largest feathered tyrannosaur yet found…
The discovery provides “direct evidence for the presence of extensively feathered gigantic dinosaurs,” wrote paleontologists led by Xing Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in their description of the new dinosaur, published April 5 in Nature. ‘Instead of giant lizards, they were basically weird birds.’