Re: Phil Currie celebration, tyrant skin, and other things

["aspidel" <aspidel@infonie.be>]

 Tim Williams <twilliams_alpha@hotmail.com> wrote, in part:

> Maybe in many feathered theropods (including the very first ones) the
areas
> *between* the feathers were scaly - irrespective of how these primordial
> feathers were scattered across the body (individually, or in clusters, or
in
> neat tracts a la modern birds).  Pluck a _Sinosauropteryx_ (or even an
> _Archaeopteryx_) and you would probably find scales underneath.
>
> You might say "But the specimens of _Sinosauropteryx_ and _Archaeopteryx_
do
> not show impressions of scaly skin."  I would say, so what; nor does
> _Compsognathus_, but should we then assume that it had naked skin?
Probably
> not.  In feathered fossil specimens, the texture of the skin between the
> feathers is usually not preserved, but we should not therefore assume the
> skin was "naked" and unscaled.
>
>
>(Jura) >Does that mean we should/could expect a secondary loss of "fuzz"
from the
> >larger theriznosaurs as well?
>
> Why not?  The bigger an animal gets, the less it needs to worry about loss
> of body heat (Surface Area / Volume ratios etc), so why not dispense with
> integumental structures that, for a large-bodied animal, could actually
> overheat the body, or impede the absorption of exogenous (solar) heat.  It
> helps in these cases to regard "cold-bloodedness" and "warm-bloodedness"
not
> as diametric opposites, but as points along a single spectrum.

Many thanks for those informations, Tim. They'll be useful for my drawings.

> Again, I cannot understand why some people are so determined to regard
> feathers as somehow exceptional, requiring new rules of biological
evolution
> to be drawn up.

I agree.

Cheers,
              Luc J. "Aspidel" BAILLY.
http://dinosauricon.com/artists/ljb.html