Short feather patterns appear all over the fossil's body, except for the lower legs. Its arms had longer feathers.
|
Did the vicious T. rex start out life looking like Tweety Bird? More and more scientists think so after a report last week of a dinosaur fossil covered in feathers!
Farmers in China found the fossil of a duck-size dinosaur called a dromaeosaur (dro-me-uh-sawr) last year. It is in such good condition that scientists can see the delicate imprints of at least three different kinds of feathers from head to tail. "This fossil is the strongest evidence yet that dinosaurs were the ancestors of birds," said Richard Prum, a bird expert at the University of Kansas Natural History Museum.
Dromaeosaurs didn’t fly: they had no wings! So why did they have feathers? Some scientists believe dinosaurs may have developed feathers for warmth.
Dromaeosaurs and T. rexes belong to the group of meat-eating dinosaurs called theropods. Mark Norell of New York City’s American Museum of Natural History believes we should change the lizard-like way that theropods have been pictured. "There’s a huge amount of evidence that all of the theropods were feathered, at least when they were young," he says. "Even baby tyrannosaurs probably looked like this."
