It’s a good day here at Dead Things: A new study provides a nice big nail in the coffin of the notion that T. rex and its kin ran around all kitted out in feathers. Lovers of old-school, scaly dinosaur renderings, rejoice!
Maybe I’m showing my age, but when I was learning about dinosaurs they were tail-dragging, vaguely reptilian, monochromatic lugs. You had your gray dinosaur, your green dinosaur and usually a brownish-tan one. Maybe some blobby dots or stripes, if the book you were reading was a bit out there.
Those 20th century notions have gone extinct as science has advanced — paleontologists recently figured out, for example, that at least some dinosaurs shared the same coloration pattern as Great White sharks.
But with the discovery that birds descended from one branch of the dinosaur family tree, and the unearthing of the first feathered dinosaurs a couple decades ago, some people — researchers, artists and ordinary dino-philes — have taken the whole BigBirdosaurus thing Way. Too. Far.
I am still emotionally scarred by a Pinterest post I saw of T. rex flaunting the plumage of a bald eagle. No. Just no.
