Wednesday 7 June 2017

Death of a Darwinian Icon: T. Rex Did Not Have Feathers, Fossil Evidence Suggests

No feathers.





Joel Kontinen

Some museums and textbooks (as well as Wikipedia, of course) have put feathers on T. rex although there is no fossil evidence that these huge reptiles ever sported them.

Recently, Dr Phil Bell (University of New England, Australia) and colleagues published a paper in the journal Biology Letters, examining skin impressions from a famous T. rex skeleton known as Wyrex.

They found no evidence of feathers.

In contrast, they found “scaly reptilian-like skin.”

However, belief in feathered dinosaurs will probably not become extinct in the very near future. Some experts have already come up with excuses for why this T. rex lacks the fluffiness they expected to see.

The Darwinian community has had to face serious problems in recent years with the discovery of Arctic dinosaurs, as well as soft tissue (that has almost become the norm) and radiocarbon (C-14) in dinosaur bone, which in effect falsifies belief in millions of years.

In addition, we have learnt that some dinosaur species never even existed.

Source:

Briggs, Helen. 2017. Study casts doubt on the idea of 'big fluffy T. rex' BBC News (7 June).