General Discussion Newly Discovered Tyrannosaur Gets the Undignified Nickname 'Pinocchio Rex'

[Shawn Hopkins]

Shawn Hopkins submitted a new blog post:

Newly Discovered Tyrannosaur Gets the Undignified Nickname 'Pinocchio Rex'

Remember when dinosaurs were monsters? Just big, dumb, scaly, devilbeasts that brutally killed and died in the distant past. That's why you liked them when you were a kid. That's why Jurassic Park made so much money.

But as always, science comes along with facts and blows away our misconceptions, even the kewl ones. Now we know that lots of dinosaurs probably had feathers. And that they were more complex than slavering beasts. And that one of them, recently discovered in China, had a great...

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[Faemonic]

Dinosaurs! I remember being so into paleontology when I was a kid. Nobody had informed me that it was only for boys, thank goodness. I guess today we've got the Philosoraptor meme, but the main target demographic is probably more into, like... vampires, and dystopia.

I'm remembering one of the Science of Discworld footnotes about how Eohippus, the Cretaceous-era (or something?) ancestor of the modern horse, had such a poetic name that meant "the dawn of the horse"...but because somebody else discovered a part of a bone earlier and thought it was a Hyrax, by the laws of scientific naming, Eohippus now had to be a sort of Hyrax and now has, "an...unpoetic name that commemorates a mistake."

If they make it undignified right off the bat, at least we know they're having fun!

 

[Leeroy_MY]

A funny thing about dinosaurs is that no one knows if they were actually covered in feathers in the past! Hahaha

This is because feathers doesn't really preserve well in fossils and don't show up on bones at all. If millions of years from now, chickens are extinct, and a fossil of a chicken is discovered, the scientific rendition of a chicken will be featherless!

So right now scientists are unsure just how many dinosaurs were actually feathered in the past. Consider this, we have linked chickens to have evolved from T-rexes! So this might mean that T-rexes were feathered dinosaurs!

Hahaha well, I for one, am willing to bet that pterodactyls were feathered.