Feathered Utahraptor: my mind has just been blown.

[Kai]

I had a major dinosaur phase in my youth. Really major, like, had big plans of being a paleontologist. I thought the raptors were the coolest thing ever, just because of their obvious speed and agility from their remains. One of my favorite books was Raptor Red by Robert T. Bakker, a fictionalization of the life of a female Utahraptor in western north america during the early Cretaceous. I have read this book many times, and I had very distinct visualizations of every scene. This was even before Jurassic Park hit the big screen, but the way I saw these was very similar to the way the Velociraptor were visualized in film because that's how people illustrated them back then.

Fast forward 17 years later. Apparently, I haven't been paying attention, because I was looking at skeletal reconstructions today and found this illustration of Velociraptor:



I was like, WHAT?!

Back then, we knew about Archeopteryx, it was just a fact of life that it had feathers, but we all thought the maniraptors (which includes Velociraptor, Utahraptor, Deinonychus, etc) didn't have feathers. But as I just discovered today, there has been a lot of recent fossil evidence from Asia that shows probably all maniraptors had feathers, including skin impressions and sockets on the forearms where primary and secondary feathers would have fit.

So, yeah. My mind has just been blown. /Utahraptor/ with feathers...



/Deinonychus/ with FEATHERS.



And not just feathers, with wing like forelegs even!

I don't know how I missed this but it's like a sack of bricks to my gestaltspeicher. Almost feel like going back and rereading Raptor Red with this knowledge in mind, revisualizing everything /feathery/...

And if you knew about this, why the hell didn't you say anything?!? The only thing cooler would be if we found out tyrannosaurs had feathery coats. Not wing like forelegs, obviously, but feathery T. rex would be so cool to think about.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I thought this was a given at this point? They even have DNA evidence that T. Rex shares DNA with chickens.

This, by the way, is why I love the idea of 12-foot-tall chickens. If you've ever spent time around chickens, you know that if they were big enough they would fuck you up.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/12/AR2007041202043.html

Hard to say whether T. Rex had feathers, but it's probably a safe bet that they were at least downy.

Think about THAT.

[Freeky]

I never knew that either! That is so cool!  WAY better than just awesome reptiles.

[Luna]

I thought this was a given at this point? They even have DNA evidence that T. Rex shares DNA with chickens.

This, by the way, is why I love the idea of 12-foot-tall chickens. If you've ever spent time around chickens, you know that if they were big enough they would fuck you up.

Aw, fuck, Nigel.

I grew up on and around farms.  The thought of 12-foot tall chickens is gonna give me nightmares.  I used to have to go get the eggs.

My rule about not eating anything to which I've been introduced while it was breathing does NOT apply to chickens.  I hate the fuckers.

[Kai]

Oh, we've know that birds are just the last extant lineage of theropods (which includes tyrannosaurs) for years now. But we didn't have any evidence of feathers in non-avian theropods except Archeopteryx and relatives. The evidence for relatedness by DNA evidence is therefore not surprising, just that maniraptors had feathers. I don't think there's any evidence that tyrannosaurs had feathers right now, but obviously I am so out of the loop that there may be.


Also, the article states that "DNA is the gold standard for determining evolutionary connectedness." Many /many/ systematists would disagree with that, considering morphology has been the "gold standard" for 150 years, and many of the DNA analysis methods are downright unscientific. Still, pretty awesome they could get sequence data out of a fossil.

[Kai]

I thought this was a given at this point? They even have DNA evidence that T. Rex shares DNA with chickens.

This, by the way, is why I love the idea of 12-foot-tall chickens. If you've ever spent time around chickens, you know that if they were big enough they would fuck you up.

Aw, fuck, Nigel.

I grew up on and around farms.  The thought of 12-foot tall chickens is gonna give me nightmares.  I used to have to go get the eggs.

My rule about not eating anything to which I've been introduced while it was breathing does NOT apply to chickens.  I hate the fuckers.

Don't worry, just go look for some large ostriches. They're probably the extant theropod most close in overall morphotype to the extinct maniraptors. I mean, all birds are Dinosauromorphs, and maniraptors, but most fly, and its pretty clear that Velociraptor et al. didn't have that capacity.

[Freeky]

This guy bears more than a little resemblance to vultures.

[Kai]

Well, the patterns of the feathers for all illustrations are just fantasy at this point. But widely unrelated species are often convergent in characters when they share lifestyles. Carnivourous and carrion birds tend to have featherless heads and feet, so the artist probably felt that similarity and drew it. It's all speculation of course, but since we'll probably never know, it can be fun.

[Freeky]

True enough.

[Don Coyote]

Fucking awesome.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I thought this was a given at this point? They even have DNA evidence that T. Rex shares DNA with chickens.

This, by the way, is why I love the idea of 12-foot-tall chickens. If you've ever spent time around chickens, you know that if they were big enough they would fuck you up.

Aw, fuck, Nigel.

I grew up on and around farms.  The thought of 12-foot tall chickens is gonna give me nightmares.  I used to have to go get the eggs.

My rule about not eating anything to which I've been introduced while it was breathing does NOT apply to chickens.  I hate the fuckers.

They are vicious bitches, is what they are. They would eat your eyes if they thought they had the chance.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Very cool.

Also, if I ever get stuck in prehistoric times, I'll know that dinosaur probably tastes like chicken. At that point I'll just have to find proto-wheat and proto-tomatoes and I can make myself a nice something-parm sub out of them. And promptly get mauled by another one of them while not paying attention.

[Don Coyote]

This thread made my crave chicken.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

This thread made my crave chicken.

NUCLEAR BUFFALO!!!!