Re: Follow-up: the truth about killer dinosaurs

["T. Michael Keesey" <keesey@gmail.com>]

On 8/31/05, Ronald Orenstein <ron.orenstein@rogers.com> wrote:
> At 06:48 PM 8/31/2005, T. Michael Keesey wrote:
> 
> >I get tired of hearing this excuse for artists to maintain the
> >"classical" view of tyrannosaurid integument. There's no fossil
> >evidence for _Ichthyornis_ having feathers, or _Patagopteryx_ or
> >_Gargantuavis_ or _Rahonavis_, but no artist would dream of seriously
> >restoring any of them as scaly.
> 
> However, is there not evidence for a scaly (or at least unfeathered)
> integument in Carnotaurus?

Yes, but _Carnotaurus_ lies well outside the clade of feathered
theropods (all of which are coelurosaurs). I think there is also a
juvenile _Allosaurus_ specimen showing scales--what this suggests is
that feathery integument evolved somewhere within non-tyrannoraptoran
_Coelurosauria_. (Of course, there are also those weird quills in that
_Psittacosaurus_ to consider....)

_Tyrannosaurus rex_ is far more closely related to avialans,
microraptorians, _Caudipteryx_, _Protarchaeopteryx_, _Beipiaosaurus_,
_Sinosauropteryx_, and especially _Dilong_ than it is to _Allosaurus_,
_Carnotaurus_, or any other dinosaur known to be scaly.

—Mike Keesey