Imagine a tyrannosaur weighing one and a half tons , completely covered in subdued , puberulent plumage . Even its tail end is flossy with plume . Though we ’ve known for a while that many dinosaur were covered in feathers , a group of Formosan researchershave now provided unmediated evidencethat gigantic , pernicious tyrannosaurus might have front a bit like wuffly birds . Three intimately over , well - preserved fossils give us a glimpse of tyrannosaurs the agency we ’ve never seen them before .
The dodo were found in the Liaoning Province in China , in the “ Yixian organization , ” a package of rocks that is sleep with to date to the early Cretaceous time period . Described today in Nature powder store , the wight are in the subgroup Tyrannosauroidea , which is part of the Therapod family that include both the iconic T. Rex as well as fly dinosaurs who eventually evolved into today ’s birds . The animate being that paleontologist Xing Xu and colleagues dubbed Yutyrannus huali would have been quite declamatory for tyrannosaurs ( the tumid , an grownup , likely librate almost 1.5 ton ) and were probably the acme predatory animal of their part .
The researchers write :
Most significantly , Y. huali bears long filamentlike feathers , thus providing direct evidence for the presence of extensively feathered gigantic dinosaurs and pop the question new perceptivity into other feather evolution .
In these fogy , you’re able to see the long , puberulent butt feathers that would have trailed out behind these huge beasts . Their quill make a typical pattern of lines around the tailbone .
And here ’s one of the Tyrannosaurus rex skull , also with distinctive impressions of feather quills on the crest of its head teacher . The question that Xu and his team require is why these large dinosaurs would have needed feathers . Usually plumage and fur are used for insulation , but creatures with large bodies often lose their pilus because they generate enough consistence heat that insulation is unnecessary . Y. huali is by far the large dinosaur known to have had feathers , and there is plenty of fossil evidence that other large tyrannosaurs had scaly skin .
The investigator chew over that these tyrannosaurs may have been adjust to extremely cold surroundings , while other tyrannosaurs live in more tropical regions . Another possibility is that Y. huali did n’t have feathering all over its organic structure — it might have had some expanse of shining plume for video display , but scale elsewhere .
Read the whole scientific articlein Nature
dinosaursPaleontologyScience
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