New tyrannosaur exhibit at AMNH

DavidBrown

DavidBrown

Well-Known Member
15+ year member
For those of you in range of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City there is a new exhibit on tyrannosaurs and T. rex running through summer 2020. From the pictures and descriptions in this article it looks pretty cool. It covers the 100 million years of the tyrannosaur lineage and includes fossils, 3D reproductions, and virtual reality recreations.

There are life-size recreations of baby, adolescent, and full-grown T.rex and all of them are covered in feathers. That just seems wrong from a cool monster perspective, but apparently is the current paleontological consensus of what they looked like. The baby T. rex looks more like a big duckling than the baby T. rex that we all know it should look like from the Jurassic Park movies.

T. Rex Like You Haven’t Seen Him: With Feathers
 
Thats kinda embarrassing coming from the AMNH! Tyrannosaurs almost certainly did NOT have feathers. Everyone seems to forget that there are plenty of skin impressions from T.rex from diverse parts of the body and all show scales. Add to this the locations of found skin impressions the from other tyrannosaurid species and it paints a very compelling picture of a fully scaled animal. At least as an adult animal. Some Theropods certainly had feathers including some genus' thought basal to tyrannosaurs. This lead people hypothesise tyrannosaurs must have therefore had feathers too. But everyone so caught up in theory they seem to forget the evidence!
 
toothlessjaws said:
Thats kinda embarrassing coming from the AMNH! Tyrannosaurs almost certainly did NOT have feathers. Everyone seems to forget that there are plenty of skin impressions from T.rex from diverse parts of the body and all show scales. Add to this the locations of found skin impressions the from other tyrannosaurid species and it paints a very compelling picture of a fully scaled animal. At least as an adult animal. Some Theropods certainly had feathers including some genus' thought basal to tyrannosaurs. This lead people hypothesise tyrannosaurs must have therefore had feathers too. But everyone so caught up in theory they seem to forget the evidence!
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The story mentions that at least one tyrannosaur with feather impressions was found:
Another recent discovery is the hollow-boned Dilong (126 million years ago), the first tyrannosaur found with fossilized feathers — discovered in 2004 by Mark Norell, the museum’s chairman of paleontology and the curator of this show, and five Chinese colleagues.
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Sinotyrannus also has surviving feather impressions :)
 
Hi Davids,

Sure, some theropods thought to be basal tyrannosaurs definitely had feathers, a fact I acknowledged in my previous post.

My point is its almost indisputable that the species T.rex (and many other larger tyrannosaurids) where covered in scales. This show, with its feathered rex model, and the articles headline, implies otherwise.

Depictions of a feathered rex is something of misconceived fad thats irking true tyrannosaur experts at the present.
 
toothlessjaws said:
Hi Davids,

Sure, some theropods thought to be basal tyrannosaurs definitely had feathers, a fact I acknowledged in my previous post.

My point is its almost indisputable that the species T.rex (and many other larger tyrannosaurids) where covered in scales. This show, with its feathered rex model, and the articles headline, implies otherwise.

Depictions of a feathered rex is something of misconceived fad thats irking true tyrannosaur experts at the present.
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I agree.
Even though there's evidence that tyrannosaurs such as Yutirannus, Sinotyrannus, and Dilong had feathers, that doesn't mean that all tyrannosaurs had feathers. The AMNH should have checked over the fossil record before doing something like this. While I do not oppose the idea that Tyrannosaurs Rex had feathers, right now there is more evidence pointing to them having scales than having feathers, or at least being fully feathered.
 
toothlessjaws said:
My point is its almost indisputable that the species T.rex (and many other larger tyrannosaurids) where covered in scales. This show, with its feathered rex model, and the articles headline, implies otherwise. Depictions of a feathered rex is something of misconceived fad thats irking true tyrannosaur experts at the present.
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Your point is disputable by the objective evidence that tyrannosaurs with feathers have been found by true tyrannosaur experts. And more likely will be.

The bottom line is that nobody really knows whether T. rex had feathers - until someone finds one with feathers, or someone invents a time machine and comes back with photos. But there is circumstantial evidence that they could have. I see nothing wrong with portraying this possibility as long as it is made clear to people that it is based on informed speculation, which the museum has according to news reports about this exhibit.
 
toothlessjaws said:
Depictions of a feathered rex is something of misconceived fad thats irking true tyrannosaur experts at the present.
Click to expand...

And no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge :P

By the by, possibly the two most well-respected experts on the Tyrannosauridae actually disagree with your stance on this matter (that evidence of scales automatically means feathers cannot have been present too) and have gone on the record to say so when a paper was published some time ago making similar claims:

Thomas Holtz - "“Beyond the descriptive elements, though, there are technical issues I have with the analyses. For one, their maximum likelihood analysis seeks to determine the ancestral integumentary state for different parts of the tyrannosaur tree. However, they treat scales, fuzz, feathers, and so forth as different states of the same character. Under this method, an individual cannot simultaneously have scales and fuzz, for instance. But of course, our observation of living birds and of dinosaurs where we have broad integumentary coverage (Juravenator, Kulindadromeus, etc.) shows us you can have both on the same individual at the same time. Instead, I think treating these as separate characters and estimating the maximum likelihood of ancestral states on the tree one-by-one would be a fairer representation of the biology.”

Steven Brusatte - "What I take some issue with is the assertion that, just because we have found some skin impressions for T. rex and other big tyrannosaurs, this means they couldn't have been feathered. Like it's either or—an animal can only have skin or feathers. That's not true, just look at birds today. Lots of feathers, but scales on their feet. And also, just because we don't find feathers fossilized, it doesn't mean they weren't there. They are so hard to preserve that you need exceptional circumstances.”
 
Hi Tea Loving Dave.

I guess we'll just have to disagree until more evidence is found. But the logic of Dr Thomas Carr makes sense to me on this issue. Seems silly to me to assume that feathers existed between the many diverse areas of the body we know scales occurred on large tyrannosaurs just because we know some (generally smaller) relatives had feathers covering most of their body.
 
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