Beautiful Feathered Tyrant, 30ft feathered Tyrannosauroid & General Dino News

[jimmy olsen]

Guess they're going to have to remake Jurrassic Park soon.

April 7, 2012

Thirty feet long and weighing in at around 3,000 pounds, Yutyrannus huali goes by the nickname "beautiful feathered tyrant." Yutyrannus earned the name "tyrant" because it casually ripped its prey to pieces. But it was also a snappy dresser: The huge predator was covered in downy feathers.

"Cuddly" and "dinosaur" may not seem like they belong in the same sentence — the beast was a close cousin of T rex, not quite as big but certainly able and happy to devour anything it wanted to — but the fossil skeletons of three of these animals were indeed feathery.

The new-to-science dinosaurs amazed paleontologist Corwin Sullivan when he first saw them. Their feathers were primitive, more like filaments, and about 7 inches long.

"The most plausible explanation, I think, is that most or perhaps virtually all of the body was covered," Sullivan says.

Back in the day — about 125 million years ago — there were other feathered dinosaurs, but they were the size of turkeys. Yutyrannus was no turkey.

Why feathers? A flying Tyrannosauroid would no doubt have been awesomely terrifying. But Yutyrannus didn't fly. Sullivan and his colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences suspect the feathers kept the animal warm. It was cooler during that period than in the days of T rex, who lived tens of millions of years later.

There's no indication what color the feathers were, but in the scientists' research paper, published in the journal Nature, an artist's rendition (seen above) shows a sort of plume along the crest of the head — a kind of punk look. The rest of the body is more of a '60s-style shag rug.

"They would have looked like hair or bristles or the downy feathers on a chick," Sullivan says. "A bit like shaggy monsters."

Like a warm and fuzzy Tyrannosaurus? "Well, lots of predators are warm and fuzzy in a sense," Sullivan says. "Think of a grizzly bear or something."

[Queequeg]

Every indication is that this was unique for a Tyrannosaurid.

[garbon]

Every indication is that this was unique for a Tyrannosaurid.

His own article suggests that.

[jimmy olsen]

Every indication is that this was unique for a Tyrannosaurid.

Not true. Earlier and smaller tyrannosaurids were feathered.

[jimmy olsen]

Every indication is that this was unique for a Tyrannosaurid.

His own article suggests that.

Well here's another article that disagrees.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/04/120404-yutyrannus-feathers-dinosaur-science-nature-biggest/

Ker Than

for National Geographic News

Published April 4, 2012

A newly discovered giant feathered dinosaur—a distant cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex—sported a fine down coat, making it the largest feathered animal known to have lived, scientists say.

Paleontologists already knew that some members of the group of dinosaurs to which T. rex belonged, called theropods, were feathered. But most of the known feathered dinos were relatively small.

"It was a question mark whether larger relatives of these small theropods were also feathered," said study team member Corwin Sullivan, a paleontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. "We simply didn't have data either way, because soft-tissue preservation of any kind is so rare."

Now three tyrannosauroid fossils—one adult and two juveniles—offer clear proof that giant theropods could also be feathered. Their feathers were simple filaments, more like the fuzzy down of a modern baby chick than the stiff plumes of an adult bird.

The new dinosaur species, detailed in this week's issue of the journal Nature, has been named Yutyrannus huali—a Latin-Mandarin mash-up that means "beautiful feathered tyrant."

(Related pictures: "'Incredible' Dinosaur Feathers Found in Amber.")

Bus-Size "Chick"

The three 125-million-year-old specimens were collected from a single quarry in Cretaceous-era rocks in northeastern China's Liaoning Province. The region is where other famed feathered dinosaurs, such as the flashy Sinosauropteryx (picture), were discovered (prehistoric time line).

The researchers estimate that the adult Yutyrannus would have measured about 30 feet (9 meters) long and weighed about 1.5 tons (1,400 kilograms).

That makes it only about a fifth to a sixth the weight of its infamous cousin Tyrannosaurus rex—but some 40 times heavier than the largest previously known feathered dinosaur.

(Related: "New Dinosaur Discovered: T. Rex Cousin Had Feathers.")

The fossilized feathers—which range from about 6 to 8 inches (15 to 20 centimeters) long—were preserved in patches on different parts of the three fossils, leading the scientists to speculate that Yutyrannus's entire body was probably covered in feathers.

The creature's large size and the primitive state of its feathers rule out the possibility of flight, Sullivan said. Instead, the downy covering may have helped keep Yutyrannus warm.

"These are among the simplest types of feathers that we find in the fossil record ... and they show up in animals of small body size, where insulation would be really important," said paleontologist Tom Holtz of the University of Maryland, who was not involved in the study.

That Yutyrannus might have needed feathers for insulation is somewhat surprising, because large-bodied animals typically retain heat quite easily.

Still, Yutyrannus lived during the middle part of the Early Cretaceous, when temperatures worldwide are thought to have been somewhat cooler than when T. rex lived, during the Late Cretaceous.

"Maybe a tyrannosauroid of comparable size [to Yutyrannus] in the Late Cretaceous wouldn't have needed feathers, whereas this animal did, just because of the climatic conditions," study co-author Sullivan said.

The University of Maryland's Holtz pointed out, however, that T. rex and its close relatives living during the Late Cretaceous wouldn't have limited them to warm environments.

"T. rex covered a huge range ... and there's no reason to think it wasn't in the Arctic Circle," Holtz said. "A lot of these animals had really big ranges north-to-south in North America, so they could easily have benefited from having some sort of plumage for insulation."

As a modern example of this, consider tigers, Holtz said. "Tigers live in the forests of Siberia down to the jungles of southeast Asia. It's true that Siberian tigers have thicker fur, but they're still furry down in the south."

It's possible that Yutyrannus's "protofeathers" served other functions besides keeping adult animals warm, the scientists say.

For example, the dinosaur may have used its feathers to keep its nest eggs warm. Additionally, the feathers may have been used for sexual display or as camouflage.

"None of these ideas are mutually exclusive," Holtz said.

Researchers next might examine tiny pigment-containing structures called melanosomes, which are possibly still preserved in the feathers, to get a sense of what Yutyrannus looked like, Holtz said.

This technique has been used recently to successfully determine the color of other feathered dinosaurs. (See "Dinosaur True Colors Revealed for First Time by Feather Study.")

"It should be able to work here" as long as the microscopic details are preserved, Holtz said. "Which means we may finally be able to know how at least one tyrannosaur was colored."

(Related: "New Feathered Dinosaur Found; Adds to Bird-Dino Theory.")

T. Rex Was Also Fiercely Fuzzy?

The latest finding increases the likelihood that the "tyrant lizard king," T. rex, was also feathered.

Scientists have speculated that T. rex juveniles were feathered, because they would have been small enough to require insulation. But it was thought the feathers might have disappeared as the animal grew older and larger.

"Well, here we have a large tyrannosaur that is fuzzy over much of its body ... and that greatly increases the chances that even [a dinosaur] that's six times larger may have retained feathers over most of its body," Holtz said.

And even covered in chicklike feathers, the giant T. rex would have been "just as fearsome as ever," Holtz added.

"Underneath the fluff, it's still the same gigantic crushing teeth and powerful jaws and softball-sized eyes staring at you," he said.

The downy feathers "might make it a little more amusing, but only until the point right before it tears you to shreds."

[CountDeMoney]

So what, half the time garbon's feathered for the weekend.

[Siege]

I like feathers.

[Eddie Teach]

How do you feel about tar?

[Viking]

What I find interesting about this is that it suggests that either feathers re-evolved repeatedly or feathers or protofeathers existed in all therapods almost from the beginning. Until now all the species identified with feathers have been late. This (afaik) is the earliest large feathered therapod. With both the big one and the small ones having feathers that puts the earliest feathers way back in time, possibly to the origins of therapods itself.

They might not all have been as feathery/furry as woolly mammoths, but they might have been as furry as modern elephants.

[jimmy olsen]

I think I'm going to turn this into a general dinosaur news thread.

Pretty cool, it was always a little disappointing to me as a kid that T. Rex didn't have a shot at any of the true giants, but now we know that they did.

http://www.montana.edu/cpa/news/nwview.php?article=10634

BOZEMAN -- New research from Montana State University's Museum of the Rockies and the State Museum of Pennsylvania has unveiled enormous bones from North America's biggest dinosaur.

In a paper published Dec. 6 in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, MSU researcher Denver W. Fowler and coauthor Robert M. Sullivan from Harrisburg, Pa., describe two gigantic vertebrae and a femur that the team collected in New Mexico from 2003 to 2006. Carrying the vertebrae alone took most of a day and was a "killer" because the paleontologists carried them 1.2 miles through 100-degree heat, Fowler said.

The bones belong to the sauropod dinosaur Alamosaurus sanjuanensis: a long-necked plant eater related to Diplodocus. The Alamosaurus roamed what is now the southwestern United States and Mexico about 69 million years ago.

"Alamosaurus has been known for some time; its remains were first described in 1922 from the Naashoibito beds of New Mexico. Since then, more bones have been discovered in New Mexico, Utah, some really nice material from Texas, and Mexico, including a few partial skeletons," Fowler said.

The sheer size of the new bones caught the researchers by surprise, however.

"We used to think that a fully grown Alamosaurus measured around 60 feet long and weighed about 30 tons; but a 2009 study by another MSU researcher, Dr. Holly Woodward, found that a femur thought to belong to an adult was still growing," Fowler said. "This told us that Alamosaurus got even bigger, but we didn't imagine that it could get quite this big."

How big? The enormity of the new bones puts Alamosaurus in the same size league as other giant sauropods from South America, including Argentinosaurus which weighed about 70 tons, and is widely considered to be the biggest dinosaur of all.

"Over the past 20 years, Argentinean and Brazilian paleontologists have been unearthing bigger and bigger dinosaurs, putting the rest of the world in the shade," Fowler said. "However, our new finds not only show that Alamosaurus is newly recognized as the biggest dinosaur from North America, but also that it was right up there with the biggest South American species: the US is back in the fight for the No.1 spot."

Although comparison of the new Alamosaurus bones with the South American species gave the researchers an idea of size, giant specimens of sauropods like Alamosaurus and Argentinosaurus are only known from very fragmentary remains offering only a tantalizing glimpse of what a complete Alamosaurus might look like, Fowler said.

"We'd love to find more complete material," Fowler continued. "Fortunately, Alamosaurus bones are quite common in the Naashoibito of New Mexico, so we have a good chance of going back and finding more, but in order to dig up one of the world's biggest dinosaurs you need one of the world's biggest dinosaur digging teams and large digging equipment."

The Pennsylvania State Museum field crew is typically just two or three people, so there are limits on how many bones can be collected in one season, Fowler said. Even so, many new and important specimens have been recovered over the past 10 to 15 years, including new species, and other members of the fauna including the iconic carnivore Tyrannosaurus.

"We found a shed Tyrannosaurus tooth with another Alamosaurus neck bone that we were excavating," Fowler said. "The Tyrannosaurus may have lost its tooth while feeding on an Alamosaurus carcass."

The Alamosaurus discovery goes beyond just "size" bragging-rights, and may have important implications for other dinosaurs, Fowler said. Recent discoveries by paleontologist Jack Horner's paleo lab at the Museum of the Rockies have emphasized the importance of understanding growth and ontogeny in interpreting dinosaur evolution.

"Increasingly, we're finding that very large or small individuals often look very different, and are often described as different species," Fowler said. "Our findings show that Alamosaurus was originally described based on immature material, and this is a problem as characteristics that define a species are typically only fully gained at adult size. This means that we might be misinterpreting the relationships of Alamosaurus and possibly other sauropod dinosaurs too."

To keep up with the latest research from the Horner Paleo Lab at the Museum of the Rockies, go to Facebook.

[Grinning_Colossus]

That T. rex was almost certainly scavenging.

[jimmy olsen]

That T. rex was almost certainly scavenging.

Kill joy! 

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/dinosaur/2012/04/when-tyrannosaurus-chomped-sauropods/

[crazy canuck]

That T-Rex has no feathers.  How can we believe the accuracy of anything else in the article?

[garbon]

So what, half the time garbon's feathered for the weekend.

How would you know? You never moved up to New York.

[jimmy olsen]

What I find interesting about this is that it suggests that either feathers re-evolved repeatedly or feathers or protofeathers existed in all therapods almost from the beginning. Until now all the species identified with feathers have been late. This (afaik) is the earliest large feathered therapod. With both the big one and the small ones having feathers that puts the earliest feathers way back in time, possibly to the origins of therapods itself.

They might not all have been as feathery/furry as woolly mammoths, but they might have been as furry as modern elephants.

Some sort of body covering probably goes all the way back to the beginning of Dinosauria.

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/dinosaur/2009/03/tianyulong-an-unexpectedly-fuzzy-dinosaur/

Tianyulong: An Unexpectedly Fuzzy Dinosaur
An artist's reconstruction of Tianyulong. By Li-Da Xing.

An artist's rendition of Tianyulong. By Li-Da Xing.

Over the past decade so many feathered dinosaurs have been discovered that it almost comes as no surprise when a new one is announced. What paleontologists did not expect, however, was to find "feathers" on a dinosaur that should not have had them. In a paper published this week in Nature paleontologists Zheng Xiao-Ting, You Hai-Lu, Xu Xing, and Dong Zhi-Ming described Tianyulong confuciusi, a small ornithischian dinosaur covered in feather-like structures.

It takes a little bit of background knowledge to understand why this is so shocking. Dinosaurs can be divided into two large groups: the saurischia (theropods and sauropods) and the ornithischia (armored dinosaurs, horned dinosaurs, hadrosaurs, etc.). To date nearly all the dinosaurs with feathers have been coelurosaurs, a group of theropods to which birds also belong, but there is one exception.

In 2002 paleontologists announced that they had discovered a specimen of the small ceratopsian dinosaur Psittacosaurus with a plume of bristles jutting from its tail. Since Psittacosaurus was an ornithischian dinosaur it was about as far removed from bird ancestry as a dinosaur could get, so why did have hollow bristly tubes on its tail that resembled early feathers? Careful examination confirmed that the structures were not some strange artifact of preservation like collagen fibers from the decomposing body, but just why this dinosaur had bristles was a puzzle.

Enter Tianyulong. This dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous rock of China was a heterodontosaurid, a group of small dinosaurs placed near the base of the ornithischian family tree. What is so special about the first specimen of Tianyulong, though, is that it exhibits three patches of hair-like structures very similar to the "bristles" on the tail of Psittacosaurus. These structures did not branch like feathers and appear to have been more rigid than the feathery "dinofuzz" of coelurosaurs. The structures possessed by Tianyulong were not feathers, but just what we should call them is now open for suggestion.

The big question is whether the bristles on Tianyulong and Psittacosaurus represent the independant evolution of a body covering among ornithischians or whether the bristles were derived from an earlier body covering shared by the common ancestor of ornithischians and saurichians. The feathers of coelurosaurs and the bristles of the ornithischians differ significantly but it is possible that they represent different derivations from a more ancient kind of body covering. The presence of a feathery or hairy body covering in dinosaurs, then, would have been lost in some groups and retained in other groups. The other alternative is that some ornithischian dinosaurs independently evolved a different sort of body covering, perhaps more than once. Which is the correct hypothesis? More research is required to know for sure, but what Tianyulong and Psittacosaurus show is that dinosaurs expressed a wider range of body coverings than we previously appreciated and hint at more amazing discoveries yet to be made.