What can you talk about for hours?

[NintendoCN]

Harvest Moon/ Story of Seasons, Persona/ Shin Megami Tensei, Zelda, Anime, just to name a few.

 

[TheGreatCthulhu]

This was an informative read and has given me much to ponder and ruminate over.

I gather that not all dinosaurs were feathered then, only some. I have often seen the classic T. Rex depicted with feathers and resembling more of a giant chicken. However, your discussion and analysis here show that not to be the case despite what some experts in the field might say about it.

I wish I could respond in kind but I have next to no knowledge on paleontology and much of what I know comes from Jurassic Park LOL. So, not quite on your level, I'm afraid.

However, I think it's amazing that we're still deriving and learning so much from animals that have been extinct for millions of years. It shows that the more we learn, the less we seem to know.

I'm curious now to hear your thoughts on other ancient animals such as Megalodon which came much later and whether you think the theory of its existence has any credit or not. I think it's all bogus, by the way.

Well, the case of the feathered T. rex had more weight, especially when we didn't have fossil skin impressions.

And yes, dinosaurs show scaly skin or feathers.

Now, what species, what type of feather, and whether or not that's indicative of a trend, that becomes much harder to say.

You get the same problem with the evolution of lactation in mammals. It becomes quite hard to say which fossil showed the early stages of lactation, because all synapsids already sort of show that, and whether or not that's indicative of a trend is much harder to say.

Adding to this, scientists estimate that of every single species of life on Earth, 99.9% of them are extinct. The fossil record is extremely rich, yet, frustratingly, incomplete.

So answering such questions like which dinosaurs were feathered and why is a difficult question to answer.

Suffice to say, all maniraptorans should be feathered, you usually can't go wrong with putting a little fluff on coelurosaurs, except for large, derived tyrannosaurids, which should be scaly, and in general, ceratopsians, stegosaurs, hadrosaurs and such should be scaly, based on fossil skin impressions, again.

However, scope this out.

There was an early ancestor of Triceratops, called Psittacosaurus, and in one fossil it showed long, quill like structures on its tail.

Now, considering that Psittacosaurus is an ancestor to all ceratopsians, there is an argument to be made that Triceratops should have these feather quills too.

And what's even crazier, is that there's a specimen of Triceratops that shows odd, semi-regular little nodules on the skin impression:

This skin impression was made by material covering the animal's skin, then it fossilized.

So we don't know if those nodules are full on bristles, or a scale bump.

So even in a line of dinosaurs that you shouldn't expect to find a type of feathers, they evidently showed up again.

Just food for thought to show just how difficult a question of whether or not dinosaurs as a whole were feathered is to answer.

Evidence shows it's kinda split down the middle, honestly. Some lineages we know for a fact are scaly, some lineages we know for a fact are feathered, and some, kinda hard to say, really.

 

[Hylian Viking]

Historical Musicology: No Joke, before I joined this forum and moved to North Carolina, I was a historical musicology student, If anyone Is curious historical musicology is the study of the history of music. My specialty of course is identifying what musical time period composers lived and worked in and what instruments should be used for an authentic performance.

 

[TheGreatCthulhu]

Historical Musicology: No Joke, before I joined this forum and moved to North Carolina, I was a historical musicology student, If anyone Is curious historical musicology is the study of the history of music. My specialty of course is identifying what musical time period composers lived and worked in and what instruments should be used for an authentic performance.

That's pretty rad.

 

[Deleted member 90890]

I can talk about Grand Theft Auto and art for hours.