The feathered Tyrannosaurus

This is pretty obvious. The birds are simply modified theopods, as we are modified apes. The dinosaurs are living still, or at least one line of them is.
 
Wait! Everything we know and believe is wrong! My new theory proves it!


Uhhhh...why am I skeptical about this??? T-Rex with feathers? To keep warm in what was a very warm environment?


But wait! Everything we believed about that environment is wrong! My new theory proves it!
 
This has been a theory for some time. Scientists really dont know very much about dinosaur behavior or appearances, but they sure have alot of theories. Some of them might be accurate. But then again, I wouldnt be suprised to see alot of accepted theory thrown out the window in 20 years or so, if/when they make more discoveries. Interesting stuff, though. how big a chicken coop would you need to raise tyrannosaurs? One egg could make alot of omelets :D
 
Science does not advance by theory. Only by data. I remember Charles R. Knight's pictures of very active dinosaurs, leaping at each other. Then for years the only dinosaurs I saw pictured were huge, sluggish, lizard-like creatures. But Knight learned to draw by following animals around, and drawing them as they moved.

Now science sees many dinos as effectively warm-blooded, although the mechanisms for this may be different from what mammals use.

Finally, museums began to show dinosaur mummies, fossils with skin imprints. Now fossils are showing up with feather imprints. The more we learn, the stranger they get. One problem still remains: with or without feathers, or pebble-grain skin, we can't see fossilized colors. This totally distorts the appearance, especially since there is reason to believe they had color vision.
 
Esav Benyamin said:
Science does not advance by theory. Only by data. I remember Charles R. Knight's pictures of very active dinosaurs, leaping at each other. Then for years the only dinosaurs I saw pictured were huge, sluggish, lizard-like creatures. But Knight learned to draw by following animals around, and drawing them as they moved.

Now science sees many dinos as effectively warm-blooded, although the mechanisms for this may be different from what mammals use.

Finally, museums began to show dinosaur mummies, fossils with skin imprints. Now fossils are showing up with feather imprints. The more we learn, the stranger they get. One problem still remains: with or without feathers, or pebble-grain skin, we can't see fossilized colors. This totally distorts the appearance, especially since there is reason to believe they had color vision.
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I understand what you're saying about science advancing by data and not theory. I was joking a bit. But, my skepticism stands because I have trouble believing that there was no data to suggest that Dinosaurs had feathers until now. Were there no fossilized imprints of Dinosaurs showing feathers until recently? Don't the fossilized remains of prehistoric birds have feather imprints? I believe I've seen photos of these kinds of fossils, so why have there been no feathered Tyranosaur imprints till now?

I also think there is something in the human mind that becomes tired of the old ways of thinking about things. I think we often invent new paradigms to replace the old just for the sake of novelty, even though we wouldn't admit it to ourselves. This struck me that way.
 
As far as I know, the first connections between theropod dinosaurs and birds came from the extreme similarity in the skeletons of what had to be related forms. In other words, if we didn't know Archaeopteryx had feathers, we'd have thought it was a small dinosaur.

In the American Museum of Natural History, there is an exhibit with an Archaeopteryx mounted as if gliding above a small dinosaur. The skeletons are almost identical.

Fossilization is rare. Survival and discovery of fossils is even rarer. To find a largely intact fossil with more detail than simply bones and teeth is rarer yet. So skin and feather imprints aren't going to show up often, no matter how common feathers may have been.

But given time, we've found them. It is this incremental addition to the data that drives a quiet revolution in thinking. Younger researchers are more open to new ideas, and as they age and become influential, they can write the new rules and the new understandings, not because they want something new, but because they are the ones who were out in the field digging up the new facts in the first place.
 
Ren the devils trailboss said:
steellover said:
This is pretty obvious. as we are modified apes.
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Speak for yourself...I dont buy into the whole we were apes theory.
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Who said we WERE apes? We ARE apes! (Some of us seemingly more so than others). :D
 
steellover said:
This is pretty obvious. The birds are simply modified theopods, as we are modified apes. The dinosaurs are living still, or at least one line of them is.
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Hey, speak in your name :D . Darwin's evolutionist hyphothesis makes me :barf:
 
Recent DNA sequencing studies show that Homo Sapiens shares 96% of its DNA with chimpanzees. It seems pretty clear that we evolved from the same branch as they did.

As to the feathered dinosaurs, the only ones for years were the very few Arcxhaeopteryx fossils that had come from the lithographic plate quarry in Bavaria. In order for the feathers to be visible, the media in which the creature was preserved must be of very fine grain and must be anaerobic so that the bacteria that normally destroy organic matter can not operate. Such a situation prevailed in the prehistoric lagoons that became Bavaria and such a situation prevailed in the lake that is now Liaoning, China. I have seen some of the fossils and you really can see the feathers on them. Since the National Geographic Society has been assisting in the funding of the digs, they are the only place outside of the PRC that has exhibited these remarkable fossils, and they are truly remarkable.
 
Speak for yourself...I dont buy into the whole we were apes theory.
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You weren't no ape, Ren.



But killing all the Oompa-Loompas won't erase your ancestral heritage either...... :p

:D
 
It's been a long time since I read 'Structure of Scientific Revolutions' but I think Kuhn said that any revolution in scientific thought is not really a matter of a swift and decisive overturn of theory, etc., but in actuality concerns the brute fact of proponents of the old view simply dying off as proponents of the new view become more prominent in Academia and promote their view at that level, which then trickles down into society at large. Crichton, who reads many scientific papers, and seems to be a generally very smart kinda guy, has suggested in one of his books that old paradigms are replaced by new which makes the old appear quaint and foolish over time. Our ideas about the world will then become obsolete and in time will appear just as foolish and quaint as those we scoff at.

It all reminds me of Plato's Cave Allegory, where we have a man chained to a wall in a cave and only able to face one direction, drawing pictures of the reality behind him by the shadows that appear on the wall in front of him. It doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in the representations put forth by the 'cave man.' I realize that advancement in science is difficult and that we are all like the cave dweller trying to make sense of the shadows (ie: fossils) thrown on the wall of our reality by chance. Mistakes are bound to be made.

Esav's remarks about fossilization being rare and Fuller's comments concerning the Bavarian Lagoons and Liaoning, China illustrate very well why we wouldn't have seen much evidence for feathered dinosaurs. But, still my skepticism stands. I guess I'm just having a very hard time imagining a T-Rex covered with feathers. It just totally ruins my image of that Bad Boy with big jaws and teeth and the fierce looking eyes. If Speilberg had made 'Jurassic Park' and put feathers on the Rex and the Raptors, I have a funny feeling the movie just wouldn't have been a hit. :)
 
The link between dinosaurs and birds was made decades ago. Were all of the dinosaurs feathered? Was there a gradual change from feathered to non-feathered creatures? Were the feathers merely an artifact of evolution, or were they actually needed?

No matter what is discovered and what is learned, there will always continue to be questions. Science is the process of learning, not a list of facts.

Best Wishes,
Bob
 
ADBF, we're not talking about T-Rex, the monster, here but a predecessor and a rather smaller version. Actually, the example found was only 1.5 meters long, about five feet. This is about the size of the Velociraptor and rather smaller than Deinonychus. So, some sort of feathering would not be out of place if they were endothermic, which seems to have been the case. Here is the National Geographic news release on the beast, along with all sorts of links, if you're interested.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/10/1006_041006_feathery_dino.html
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/10/photogalleries/feathered_dinosaur/
 
Here is another source that might be of interest. It is a bit dated since its webmaster, Jeff Polling seems not to have the ime to keep it up, but the info in it is superb up to the last couple of years.

http://www.dinosauria.com/jdp/jdp.htm

And, Bob W, the dino-bird link goes back to the 19th Century and to Thomas Huxley. It was too extreme at the time because it depended upon the Theory of Evolution, so it was not accepted.
 
A Dogs Best Friend said:
If Speilberg had made 'Jurassic Park' and put feathers on the Rex and the Raptors, I have a funny feeling the movie just wouldn't have been a hit. :)
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Spielberg took a Hell of a lot of liberties with the raptors in "Jurassic Park". If you read the book, they were small, very fierce, and in large numbers but that would have been too expensive at the time the film was made, so he made them bigger and fewer. The result was that they were bigger than any raptor then known until a guy came out of the Utah wilderness with a giant raptor claw. They named the critter "Utahraptor" and considered "Spielbergensis" for its second name, but I think that it was dropped. In any case, they sent him a cast of the claw before the official announcement of the find so that he would know that there really was a raptor as big as he had posited. Of course, they have found even bigger ones since then.

Personally, I don't find feathered dinos to be less threatening. You should rent the Discovery Channel 4 part show, "Dinosaur World", and see what you make of the Velociraptors and Oviraptors in that one since they are all feathered. And, if you think that all birdies are cute, take a look at this article on the South American phorurhacid birds of about 10 mya.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/08/0801_050801_terrorbirds.html
 
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