It appears that all those books, movies, illustrations, etc. showing dinosaurs as big, scaly creatures will have to go in the trash. The
discovery of a new dinosaur,
Tianyulong confuciusi, by Chinese researchers led by Xiao-Ting Zheng could possibly remodel conventional wisdom regarding the body covering of dinosaurs
Anybody who has looked at a dinosaur picture book more than once in childhood can remember dinosaurs in all their myriad shapes as having scaly or armor-plated skin. Over the last few decades, the discoveries of
theropods, meat-eating dinosaurs with evidence of feathers has brought the idea of theropods covered in a coat of feathers. The early
horned dinosaurs,
psittacosaurs, left fossils with apparent quills over the back and tail. That was it for covering.
Until now. Tianyulong was found with impressions that resemble the
proto-feathers of early theropods. One problem.
Tianyulong was a
heterodontosaur, an early branch on the tree on the
other side of the main split; the
Saurischia-
Ornithischia division. That means
all of the families of dinosaurs might have had some sort of covering at some point in their history. They might have been fuzzy or furry or downright shaggy.
Illustrators are going to have a field day.
A new paper by Darren Naish, Michael Taylor and Matt Wedel is rewriting the book (again) on how sauropod dinosaurs looked. It compares the neck posture of living tetrapods with the iconic giant sauropods and concludes that they walked with their incredibly long necks held erect rather than held out in front of them, like commonly depicted. These guys know what they're talking about; they're hard core when it comes to the vertebrae of sauropods.
