Was Tyrannosaurus rex feathered?

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Even though it's grown more common to reconstruct certain dinosaurs, such as the raptors, with feathers, T. Rex remains one of those dinosaurs you can depict as entirely scaly without being corrected. People like to think that, while T. Rex may have descended from feathered tyrannosauroids such as Dilong paradoxus, somewhere in its evolution it lost its feathers and became scaly again so that it wouldn't overheat due to its size.

However, there is in fact reason to think that T. Rex retained much of its ancestors' plumage. It has been calculated that despite weighing over six tons, T. Rex's metabolism was equivalent to that of a one-ton mammal, meaning that it would only produce as much body heat as a one-ton mammal. Now, it turns out that almost all terrestrial mammals weighing close to a ton, such as the African buffalo, giant eland, and Indian gaur have retained insulatory integument without overheating. Given that T. Rex was in no more danger of overheating than these animals, it's very likely that it too retained insulatory integument.

"But T. Rex skin impressions showing scales have been found," you might object. That's true, but they're all from the underside of the tail. That only suggests that T. Rex's underside was scaly, not that the whole animal was scaly. Even birds have scales on some parts of their bodies. Most likely T. Rex had a mixture of scaly and feathery integument, with the scales being located on the underside while the upper half was feathered.

A lot of people may not like the idea of a feathered T. Rex, but I for one think it would look totally sweet. A feathery coat would make T. Rex easily stand apart visually from other big meat-eating dinosaurs like Allosaurus or Giganotosaurus.

Hopefully more evidence regarding T. Rex's integument will surface sometime.

It may have been, but I will probably continue to have a mental image of all dinosaurs as scaly creatures.

Strange that we dont have a written record or even a contemporary drawing of such an animal. There are after all many people (a number of whom frequent this forum) who believe we cohabited with T Rex.

Oh look out here comes the Behemoth brigade.

I find the proposal laughable.

If you know anything about birds, feathers, mammals and reptiles, you would know that dinosaurs could not have had feathers. The nature of how a bird does what it can with feathers involves structures that DO NOT exist in reptiles. It's all in the skin, and it's a very complex system. Technically monkeys and man have more in common with birds and their feathers than reptiles do, and to suggest birds came from feathered reptiles is to really argue a massive evolutionary chain that has no credibility. A dinosaur with leathery wings could glide or fly to some extent. However, the leap to feathered birds is just too much to take seriously.

Wouldn't there be evidence in the imprints? Feathers have pinions.

i am inclined to think that tyrannosaurs did not have feathers.

i know that the first form of a bird (archaeopteryx) was related to earlier small theropod dinosaurs who had crude feathers, but i do not see how the retention of feathers through the millions of years of evolution of a lateral lineage that resulted in tyrannosaurs would have been a feasible artifact.
during the cretaceous period, the temperature was not low enough at any time of the day to make feathers an advantage to survival.

obviously the "wind lift" properties of feathers would not apply to tyrannosaurs, so they would not have conferred any advantage to the mobility of the animal, and the density and volume of the animals bio mass would have been sufficient for it to retain it's body temperature without feathers, especially during the cretaceous period where feathers would have actually been a disadvantage due to the reduced ability for the animal to dissipate heat during the day.

it is possible that another function of feathers may have been to alert the animal to minute variations of air pressure produced by distant sounds that their ears could not pick up. so it may well be the case that tyrannosaurs had feathers for reasons i can not determine.

i can not imagine a 6-8 ton animal retaining feathers after a month of walking though foliage and coming into contact with energetic prey unless the quills were very thick and deeply rooted. and i can not imagine even in that scenario that they would retain a gossamer plumage.

i think that the fact that quills are rooted deeply into the skin would mean that any bodily contact that was adversarial, or merely the collision with foliage would incur subcutaneous injuries that would be disadvantageous in some way to the biological efficacy of feathers.

jeez i am tired and i am going to get ripped apart but i am 10,000 miles away so i do not care

i can not determine with my level of knowledge whether they had feathers or not.

Alternatively, Tyrannosaurs may have had stiff protofeather bristles, similar to the hairs on modern elephants.