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Apparently, more dinosaurs had feathers than we thought.

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To add to my previous post:

The Deinonychosaurs--the group containing the Dromaeosaurids ("raptors") and their close relatives--are better visualized not as bird like reptiles but more like reptile-like birds. Archaeopteryx, the much touted first bird (and something no one seems to have trouble with feathery depictions of?) is very close to being a Deinonychosaur (if not one in and of itself).

The_Thermopolis_Specimen_by_shartman.jpg


velociraptor.jpg


They didn't just start growing wings with Archaeopteryx.
 
Don't the feathers only apply to certain time periods? Some dinosaur show I watched said they only started getting feathers towards the end of their existence.
 
Spaceman Spiff said:
?

Filamentous feathers on a basal megalosauroid puts their presence closer to the base of the dinosaur evolutionary tree than earlier discoveries did. The preservation of similar structures on some ornithischian dinosaurs suggested that feathers were more widespread among dinosaurs than previously thought.

I'm not seeing how that contradicts what Norell said, unless I misinterpreted your post.
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And that's good, as I wasn't.

massoluk said:
FFS, Brachiosaurus and Triceratops are still safe from this feather nonsense, right? Right? Please?
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You ready for this? Many of the "Brachiosaurus" were Giraffatitan.
 
What are you guys talking about?

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Feathers are AWESOME. If I could relive my childhood with dinosaurs like this instead, I totally would.
 
Nothing will bother me more than people bitching about scientists "ruining their childhood."
Sorry, dinosaurs are not your child. You missed them by a considerable number of years. And Pluto never should have been a fucking planet. Get over it.
 
massoluk said:
FFS, Brachiosaurus and Triceratops are still safe from this feather nonsense, right? Right? Please?
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Sauropods (long-necked dinosaurs) were scaly from apparently the day they were born--there are known specimens of sauropod embryos covered in scales. They are "safe."

Though, as SatelliteOfLove stated, what you likely picture in your head as "Brachiosaurus" is probably actually Giraffatitan. It's kind of complicated--most renditions of Brachiosaurus in paleoart and popular culture are based on the African species that was found after the original American species, as it was known from more complete remains. It's recently come to light, after some actual scrutinizing of the two animals, that the American and African species of Brachiosaurus aren't as similar as once thought, and the African species of Brachiosaurus was assigned a "new" genus (which was actually a few decades old, but that's a story for another time), Giraffatitan.

Though they're still pretty similar animals.

Triceratops is kind of an interesting question. Feathers as in "bird feathers?" No, Triceratops did not have feathers. However, it may have had quills on its back/tail. Something like this maybe:
Triceratops.jpg


Feathers so far are limited to a wide swath of theropods (but not all of them) and possibly to some really primitive ornithischians (which are never depicted in any pop-culture fashion anyway), with Ceratopsians possibly possessing some quills (one for sure does). And honestly, I wouldn't expect to see them on any other dinosaurs.

ElectricBlue187 said:
disturbing? why would any of this disturb you?

anyway I think there were flying dinosaurs like Pterosaurs that wouldn't look stupid with feathers
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EmCeeGramr already covered this, but:

>:|

(pterosaurs are also covered with a fluffy coat of not-quite fur and not-quite feather stuff paleontologists call "pycnofibres.")

EskimoJoe said:
Nothing will bother me more than people bitching about scientists "ruining their childhood."
Sorry, dinosaurs are not your child. You missed them by a considerable number of years. And Pluto never should have been a fucking planet. Get over it.
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And thank you.
 
Yeah I don't understand the uproar either.

What makes dinosaurs cool is certainly not the lack of feathers, is that hey were giant predator that would freak the hell out of you. And I'm pretty sure they would still do exactly that to anyone, feathers or not.
 
big_z said:
Don't the feathers only apply to certain time periods? Some dinosaur show I watched said they only started getting feathers towards the end of their existence.
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This new discovery pushes feather dinosaurs even earlier into its history. A basal megalosauroid having feathers could mean this isn't unique to just Sciurumimus. Many more megalosaurs could have had feathers.

There also appears to be skin impressions of Triceratops skin showing signs they had feather filaments on it.
 
Jurassic Park was only "cutting edge" to people who still thought T. rex adopted the tripod stance, anyway. It warped anatomy and created attributes out of whole cloth all the time. Scientists didn't suddenly go "whoops!" after the movie was released. People knew that Velociraptor was small since the 1920s. There was never any evidence for movement-based vision in tyrannosaurs (especially since the book explained that was an attribute created by the frog DNA), Dilophosaurus was larger than a Velociraptor or even the Deinonychus-sized raptors in the movie, and there's no evidence of frills or venomous spit, and Velociraptor was definitely not a super genius capable of opening doors (if it was capable of reaching a door [or turning its wrists on the doorknob]).

This wasn't new at the time of the book or the movie.
 
mantidor said:
Yeah I don't understand the uproar either.

What makes dinosaurs cool is certainly not the lack of feathers, is that hey were giant predator that would freak the hell out of you. And I'm pretty sure they would still do exactly that to anyone, feathers or not.
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In general I'd say its probably like comparing a real life Godzilla to skittles the 10ft rainbow turkey. One looks awesome and terrifying, the other is pretty ridiculous looking so far from artist renditions.
 
EmCeeGramr said:
Jurassic Park was only "cutting edge" to people who still thought T. rex adopted the tripod stance, anyway. It warped anatomy and created attributes out of whole cloth all the time. Scientists didn't suddenly go "whoops!" after the movie was released. People knew that Velociraptor was small since the 1920s. There was never any evidence for movement-based vision in tyrannosaurs (especially since the book explained that was an attribute created by the frog DNA), Dilophosaurus was larger than a Velociraptor or even the Deinonychus-sized raptors in the movie, and there's no evidence of frills or venomous spit, and Velociraptor was definitely not a super genius capable of opening doors (if it was capable of reaching a door [or turning its wrists on the doorknob]).

This wasn't new at the time of the book or the movie.
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cool stuff
still don't care about the truth
 
I'm ok with this. I actually think they look cooler with feathers if we're going by artist renditions.
 
EmCeeGramr said:
Jurassic Park was only "cutting edge" to people who still thought T. rex adopted the tripod stance, anyway. It warped anatomy and created attributes out of whole cloth all the time. Scientists didn't suddenly go "whoops!" after the movie was released. People knew that Velociraptor was small since the 1920s. There was never any evidence for movement-based vision in tyrannosaurs (especially since the book explained that was an attribute created by the frog DNA), Dilophosaurus was larger than a Velociraptor or even the Deinonychus-sized raptors in the movie, and there's no evidence of frills or venomous spit, and Velociraptor was definitely not a super genius capable of opening doors (if it was capable of reaching a door [or turning its wrists on the doorknob]).

This wasn't new at the time of the book or the movie.
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There can be a tendency for some to overstate Jurassic Park's scientific credentials.

By 1993, dinosaurs had been out of the swamps and had their tails aloft for roughly two decades, at least in scientific circles. The movie was a paradigm shift for the general public because for many, prior exposure to dinosaurs more often that not featured reptilian throwbacks costarring with Raquel Welch or cowboys with lassos. Ironically, in the context of the prevailing paleontological opinion of the times, some of the old flicks were, at the very least, no less accurate in their portrayal of dinosaurs than was Jurassic Park, and perhaps more so in certain cases.

It's not like the scientific advisers Spielberg and company brought on didn't know what they were getting into. They were consulting on a summer blockbuster, not a PBS documentary. I'm sure their input was mostly on the general look of the dinosaurs, maybe with some speculation on behavior, but it was otherwise up to the filmmakers to use the dinosaurs in the context of the story they wanted to tell.

And that's okay.

I have no problems with the movie itself; it blew my mind with the fury of a thousand supernovae as a kid in the theater, and I can easily accept it as a piece of fiction largely devoid of scientific basis. I'm more irritated that for the media and a large percentage of the public, if some of the responses in this thread are anything to go by, the perception of dinosaurs hasn't moved on in the last 19 years.

Shit, maybe I'm just a crotchety old fart griping for no reason. They can have their highfalutin Jurassic Park 4, fine, just as long as they stay the fuck off my lawn.
 
I've said it before and even blogged about it, but my personal theory for why people react with such hostility to the idea that dinosaurs, especially the scary ones, sported feathers is because somewhere deep inside our monkey brains is some vestigial instinct that responds to reptiles (especially snakes) with fear and loathing but to birds with indifference.

The very fact that dinosaurs were scary, huge, draconian creatures is exactly what makes them fascinating to kids, especially boys. The fact that they were traditionally scaly and reptilian in their look just added to their mystique.

Give them feathers and you just take away something that made them seem so fierce in the first place. It's a bit like finding out that Ghenghis Khan was a ginger. It just changes your perception of them.

For the record, I like feathered dinosaurs. Go science!
 
Birds ARE dinosaurs

When you look at a chicken or a falcon or eagle standing up you can totally see how they came from dinosaurs
 
It's totally awesome that our concept of what Dinosaurs looked like has evolved so much in the last 15 years. Keep doing what you're doing paleontologists, you rock.
 
I think feathered dinos are awesome. The more evolutionary links between dinosaurs and moderns birds we find, the more fascinating they become.

I always loved dinosaurs as a kid, and it's amazing to me that we still live among them. Science isn't ruining my childhood. That's letting me relive it.
 
In the same way humans are less hairy than they were, and other animals are even hairier than their ancestors I'd say it's safe to assume that certain species of dinosaur were completely featherless, and evolved to grow more prominent feathers and vice versa. So both feathered and non-feathered variants of the same species are possible.
 
Edmond Dantès;39513158 said:
Tyrannosaurus-rex+plumas.jpg


On a serious note, it's still highly debatable as to whether larger theropods had extensive coverage or any coverage at all.
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It's like a picture of T-Rex the teenage years or something, lol.
 
I hate dinosaur threads. They are often filled with people attempting to appear as experts who don't know what they're talking about. Surely gaf has at least one paleontologist who can clean up here?
 
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