A reconstructed model of a young Tyrannosaurus at the Natural History
Museum of Los Angeles County. Were these little tyrants covered in
feathers? Photo by the author.
To date, no one has found the fossilized remnants of feathers with a Tyrannosaurus
skeleton. A few patches of scaly skin are known from some big
tyrannosaur specimens, and those scraps represent about all we know for
sure about the body covering of the largest tyrants. So why is Tyrannosaurus
so often depicted with a coat of dino-fuzz these days? That has
everything to do with the evolutionary relationships of the great
tyrannosaur lineage.
Until the early 1990s, paleontologists often placed tyrannosaurus with Allosaurus, Spinosaurus, Torvosaurus
and others inside a group called the Carnosauria. These were the
biggest of the carnivorous dinosaurs. But the group didn’t make
evolutionary sense. As new discoveries were made and old finds were
analyzed, paleontologists found that the dinosaurs within the
Carnosauria actually belonged to several different and distinct lineages
that had branched off from one another relatively early in dinosaur
history. The tyrannosaurs were placed within the Coelurosauria, a large
and varied group of theropod dinosaurs which includes dromaeosaurs,
therizinosaurs, ornithomimosaurs, oviraptorosaurs and others. Almost
every single coelurosaur lineage has been found to have feather-covered
representatives, including the tyrannosaurs.
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