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The story with Tyrannosaurus feathers is interesting. For a while you saw Tyrannosaurus depicted with feathers because it seems like it should have them, because its earlier relatives do. Here's Guanlong, an earlier tyrannosauroid: By Joanna Kobierska, who makes some of the best feathered dinosaurs. A good bet is that Tyrannosaurus did have feathered ancestors, but lost its feathers and re-evolved scales to not overheat since it got so large. Scales and filamentous feathers are the same structure - you can think of a feather as an extruded scale, or a scale as a compressed feather. When you look at birds, going back and forth doesn't seem far-fetched. Bird scales are known to be derived from feathers, and there are even some birds which switch between feathers and scales on their feet seasonally. Bird scales:  The scaliness of Tyrannosaurus and its close relatives is well-attested:  A modern Tyrannosaurus reconstruction was already posted, but here's another one by Max Bellomio that's pretty much equally likely. It has some speculative sparse filamentation between its scales, which isn't impossible, especially considering birds do mix feathers and scales too (see chicken feet). The keratin structures on the head like the horns are also things that are known to have been there, but their shape and extent is unknown, so you see various guesses. UIltimately it hasn't changed a ton from the 90s depiction.  The evolution of feathers in dinosaurs got so muddled that now we aren't actually fully sure if dinosaurs started out scaled or feathered. It's possible the first ones were fuzzy and most evolved scales later.
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Dec 19, 2023 06:06
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 00:19 |
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redshirt posted:I want to believe 
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Dec 20, 2023 08:16
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All legs ain't got no time for arms, permanently Naruto running & loving it
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Dec 20, 2023 22:12
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A giraffe weighs around 1000 kg. A Quetzalcoatlus is much more lightly built, at an estimated 200 - 250 kg. I'm not sure anyone expects they'd have ran as such. Drastically different scale, but walking on wings isn't unheard of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziDElEh5hi4 From what I've skimmed sources I don't think any contrivances about atmospheric oxygen or whatnot are needed to make the math work on them flying. I know there have been some suggestions that they'd have been flightless, but I don't think that's the mainstream view, and for a terrestrial animal it just looks incredibly fragile and ungainly. Competent at moving on land, perhaps taking prey on land, sure, but this very lightweight and incredibly specialized form for a purely terrestrial animal? 
Elukka fucked around with this message at 10:29 on Dec 23, 2023 |
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Dec 23, 2023 10:25
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Buce posted:it does seem pretty funny that earlier paleos didn't draw a connection between some of the bones they were finding and modern birds. just assumed everything was a large, modern, armor-plated lizard of some variety. Wikipedia posted:Biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his tenacious support of the new theory of evolution by means of natural selection, almost immediately seized upon Archaeopteryx as a transitional fossil between birds and reptiles. Starting in 1868, and following earlier suggestions by Carl Gegenbaur,[6] and Edward Drinker Cope,[7] Huxley made detailed comparisons of Archaeopteryx with various prehistoric reptiles and found that it was most similar to dinosaurs like Hypsilophodon and Compsognathus.[8][9] The discovery in the late 1870s of the iconic "Berlin specimen" of Archaeopteryx, complete with a set of reptilian teeth, provided further evidence. Like Cope, Huxley proposed an evolutionary relationship between birds and dinosaurs. Although Huxley was opposed by the very influential Owen, his conclusions were accepted by many biologists, including Baron Franz Nopcsa,[10] while others, notably Harry Seeley,[11] argued that the similarities were due to convergent evolution. Art from 1916: 
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Dec 25, 2023 05:26
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