The Official Feathered Dinosaur Shitstorm Thread

[Belesarius]

Omnomnomnom.

 

http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/tyrannosaur-fossil-shows-evidence-cannibalism

[Belesarius]

http://news.sciencemag.org/paleontology/2015/04/new-species-terror-bird-discovered

[Sturgeon]

Hammering at this long bent and battered nail is beginning to pay off; now there is a depiction in the popular press of feathered tyrannosaurs.

 

 

These depictions are more or less OK. I'm not sure why they can't seem to get away from naked dino faces, though.

At the bottom you can see one of Steve's many colorful knives.

[Belesarius]

Hammering at this long bent and battered nail is beginning to pay off; now there is a depiction in the popular press of feathered tyrannosaurs.

 

 

These depictions are more or less OK. I'm not sure why they can't seem to get away from naked dino faces, though.

At the bottom you can see one of Steve's many colorful knives.

Because there is a lot of evidence that T-Rex was a scavenger and take a look at Turkey Vultures.  Blood and fleshy bits are hard to get out of feathers.

[Sturgeon]

Oh sure, bring up the fact that some dinosaurs surely were naked-faced as an excuse to leave a little Hollywood in my T-Rex!

[Belesarius]

If you gotta stick your face in a rotting corpse to get sustenance, do you really want to try and save some for later?  I mean the smell alone... 30 degree heat, rotting flesh.

[Sturgeon]

While many vultures are naked-faced, some are not. Lammergeiers, for example.

My point is that all of these things are excuses to not EMBRACE THE FLUFFY.

Also, lol "30 degrees". I'm sitting here wondering "what, 30 degrees? That's like, winter temps... OH CELSIUS".

[Toxn]

Embrace metric and be saved, heathen!

[Sturgeon]

I'll never join the Dark Side of temperature measurement! I am a Fahrenheit, like my father before me, and his father, but probably not his father, who most likely measured temperature in some arcane and banal measurement like mmHg or something!

[Toxn]

Dark side? Bitch please, your system is called Imperial.

[Collimatrix]

It's an ok illustration.  It has feathers and the hands are not pronated, and the artist did a good job of capturing the 3-dimensional shape of a tyrannosaurid skull (it's different than other theropods).

 

But the skull is shrink-wrapped, and the feathers don't come off the second finger,.

[Donward]

Muscovy ducks and Turkeys have flabs of skin on their face too. And they're not carrion eaters.

 

 

[Donward]

Relevant.

 

http://xkcd.com/1527/

 

[Belesarius]

Dinosaurs and a wedding?  Sweet! 

 

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science/betrothal-and-the-beast-fossil-find-spurs-wedding-bells/article24798184/

[Donward]

I guess this is now relevant.

 

[Priory_of_Sion]

Apparently the jury is still out whether those "feathered" ornithischians were actually feathered calling into question whether the LCA of dinosaurs was fuzzy or not according to a new study in Biology Letters.

 

A new study, published in the journal Biology Letters this week, suggests that feathers were less prevalent among dinosaurs than previously believed. Scientists examined the fossil record of dinosaur skin and combined this with an evolutionary tree to assess the probability of feathers appearing in different dinosaur groups. This analysis demonstrated that the majority of non-avian dinosaurs were more likely to have scales than to exhibit signs of 'feather-like' structures.

 

"As palaeontologists we are at the mercy of available data, which given the interest in the field are ever changing. Our study shows that dinosaurs experimented extensively with their 'outer look' and potentially independently along separate evolutionary lineages. That is what the data allow us to say at present" says Nicolàs Campione, researcher at the Department of Earth Sciences, Palaeobiology, Uppsala University.

 

The controversial findings will add further fuel to a fierce debate among scientists as to whether the majority of dinosaurs were feathered or scaly.

 

Over the past two decades a number of spectacularly preserved dinosaur fossils with feathers have revolutionised the field of palaeontology. Due to the conflicting presence of scales and feathers in these new specimens, many scientists are convinced that this is an area of study that deserves further research.

 

The presence of feathers in birds and their immediate ancestors - theropod dinosaurs like Velociraptor - is uncontroversial, but their presence or absence in other dinosaur groups, such as those including Triceratops and Diplodocus, has been highly debated. Several recent discoveries had suggested that filament-like 'protofeathers' might be ubiquitous among dinosaurs, but the new research suggests that the common ancestor of dinosaurs did not necessarily have protofeathers and that the quills and filaments in some major plant-eating dinosaur groups were evolutionary experiments that were independent of true feather origins.

 

Dinosaur biology remains a disputed and competitive area of research.

 

"Using a comprehensive database of dinosaur skin impressions, we attempted to reconstruct and interpret the evolutionary history of dinosaur scales and feathers. Most of our analyses provide no support for the appearance of feathers in the majority of non-avian dinosaurs and although many meat-eating dinosaurs were feathered, the majority of other dinosaurs, including the ancestor of all dinosaurs, were probably scaly" says Paul Barrett professor at the Natural History Museum.

 

"Current data, for the most part, suggest that the common ancestor of dinosaurs was not feathered. However, this is a hypothesis that can only be tested with the discovery of new fossils with preserved skin and/or feathers. In particular, we need fossils that fill key locations in the evolutionary tree of dinosaurs" says Nicolàs Campione. - link

[Sturgeon]

Wouldn't it be wild if pterosaur "fuzz" and feathers were non-homologous?

[Collimatrix]

It would be pretty crazy.  The most recent evidence suggested that archosaurs became warm-blooded way, way before stem ornithodirans.  Hell, I think crocodiles are secondarily cold blooded according to the most recent stuff.

 

So what in the hell would all these warm-blooded avemetatarsalia be doing running around with no insulation to keep in all that body heat?  Would be weird as hell.

[Sturgeon]

#buildabetterfaketheropod, the only good thing to come from the new Jurassic Park movie:

[Sturgeon]

Grandpa Jerry hates featherless dinos just as much as I do:
 

[Belesarius]

That was magical.

[T___A]

In the Jurassic Park books they use LAWs as weapons against dinosaurs. In real life how effective would be a LAW over say a M82?

[Priory_of_Sion]

In the Jurassic Park books they use LAWs as weapons against dinosaurs. In real life how effective would be a LAW over say a M82?

An M82 should do fine. Large caliber rifles can down elephants and a dinosaur which is roughly the same mass like a Tyrannosaur should go down.

 

LAW would just make a mess. 

[Sturgeon]

A LAW would be much better. The irony is, without a solid headshot, elephant rifles aren't all that effective against elephants.

A shaped charge stands a chance at being much more effective if the penetration is good enough.

[Khand-e]

That and a Shaped charge carries a pretty significant amount of very potent high explosive, at the velocities you typically see in shoulder fired weapons, Chemical energy tends to be far more effective then kinetic (aka, the projectile isn't traveling at goddamn relativistic velocities or has a nuclear warhead.)