Feathered Dinosaurs

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Am I the only person here who actually likes feathered dinosaurs?

Feathered dinosaurs are verry merry berry wunderbar.

Winter fashion for the dinosaur about town. Insulating feathers.

Combining warmth with style!

I wonder how long it will take before we see dinosaurs that are not shrink wrapped in popular culture.

I never met anyone who actively DISliked feathered dinosaurs. Actually most Young Earth Creationists despise them. But no one else has any animus towards them.

I like how Tyrantrum is a feathered dino.


Metelgreymon could have been a feathered dino ... but they chose to call it hair instead.

A lot of geeks and movies fans dislike them. Ordinary peoples don't want to see realistic dinosaurs, they want to see featherless dinosaurs.
http://wrongplanet.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=285254

I dunno, ever since I've read this XKCD strip about feathered dinos, I've thought the concept to be pretty awesome.

WOW!

Had no idea of the passions this issue aroused!

Also- I knew that some dinos were thought to have feathers, but not all. Didn't know that T-rex was proven to have feathers.

Though many dinosaur lovers, and fans of old school pulp sci fi like their dinosaurs featherless, many in the public like the idea that there is "a little bit of T-Rex in the chickadees at my birdfeeder". One bird scientists is still fighting the fight against dinosaur scientists (and their lay fans in the public) trying to debunk this "birds are dinosaurs theory".

From what I understand, there are some very early transition-stage dinosaurs who appear to have had some plumage, and many more suggestive finds of later dinosaurs outside of the raptor range involving the presence of plumage are cropping up, both of which have caused some paleontologists to posit that most, if not all, dinosaurs had some sort of feathers. These may have been of varying qualities, may have varied across the body, and were also not the kind of feathers we think of with birds today. They were much simpler in the complexity of the barbs present and were really more of a proto-feather. Mature bird feathers have considerable branching complexity when viewed up close, something which has not been seen in the saurichian proto-feathers. (Brian Switek does a good job covering some of these theories in his book, My Beloved Brontosaurus, and also reviews information on the astounding breadth of crocodilian evolution and how these animals, some of whom were bipedal, did a good job giving the dinosaurs of North America a run for their money in terms of competition.)

Also, if anyone's interested in the construction of dinosaur proto-feathers, there's a good article from 2011 on some Canadian finds here.

That article is quite interesting.

We all know about bugs getting perserved in amber for tens of millions of years. Critters much bigger than bugs dont get preserved in amber, but apparently quite large animals can leave their bodily detritus in amber (this is the dinosaur equivalent of hair and dander getting preserved).

The article is quite jargony, but as I understand it - these proto feathers came from the large dinosaurs living in the pine forest. Got shed like cat hairs. Fell onto the sticky sap coming out of the trees, and got preserved for us to see 70-80 million years later.

Awesome!

Some were fully evolved feathers from the early birds of the time, but some were protofeathers from ground living dinosaurs of various sizes. . And they show gradual change from feathers as simple insulation for ground animals, to the modern feather as airfoil for specialized flying vertebrates.

It's really quite simple.

The old representation, from when I was young:



Or the newer interpretation of the available data:



Now, which one would YOU find more impressive if you happened to be Deinonychus prey?

I personally find the new representations awe-inspiring, not just because I'd still probably crap my pants were I to come face to face with one, but also because it makes more evolutionary sense. Rather than seeing an abrupt shift from reptile to bird, dinosaurs were instead highly representative of many subtle stages of transition. Kind of like seeing a common growing theme to the various ancestors of the whales, which have been well studied and offer many transition fossils. In short, the dino family tree makes more sense.

How to not draw dinosaurs:




For a more accurate interpretation:




For a more or less accurate representation, there is also this one.

The dinosaurs never quite went extinct. The ones that survive we now call birds.

Bring on the feathers, I say!

To me, it's just part of how dinsosaurs are getting more and more interesting. We used to think they were these big, dumb, sluggish things, only impressive for their size. Primitive creatures that died to make way for us sophisticated mammals, poor sods.

As a teenager, my favourite dinosaur was Deinonychus, the raptor with the massive middle-toe claws. It's because in a more highbrow illustrated dino book I read about John Ostrom's work on Deinonychus. He realised that, for its anatomy to make any sense, this creature had to be fast, agile, poised and probably quite intelligent. Instead of lurching slowly around roaring at things, Deinonychus was bounding about doing flying kicks with a scythe on its foot. Way more interesting.

Years later, I learned about the Secretarybird. Which is a really strange African bird related to eagles, hawks and vultures. It can fly, but doesn't hunt in the air. Instead, it runs around the plains on its long skinny legs, kicking things to death and eating them. Plus ca change....