What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word dinosaur? Some words would most likely be big, strong, and scaly. Well, scaly might not be the right word to describe dinosaurs based on new discoveries .
image from http://nerdist.com/the-public-is-ready-to-see-dinosaurs-with-feathers/
image from http://www.idigitaltimes.com/jurassic-world-toys-reveal-raptor-squad-names-and-prove-hasbro-didnt-listen-dr-grant-415646
Above is a comparison of a scene from the movie Jurassic World, with the top image being modified to show how these raptors could have looked with feathers (they look pretty cute if you ask me).
Previously, it was only theropod dinosaurs that were considered to have feathers, based on fossils found in China over the past twenty years. However, fossilized feathers were found in Siberia of a dinosaur called Kulindadromeus zabaikalicus (what a mouthful). This dino is not part of the theropod family, causing Pascal Godefroit, paleontologist, to believe that all families of dinosaurs had feathers (Dan Vergano, National Geographic).
So what does this tell us about dinosaurs? According to Stephen J. Bodio of Living Bird magazine, dinosaurs and birds are more similar than we thought. Bodio describes the respiratory systems of birds, and compares the similarity to that of dinosaurs. This respiratory system is more effective than mammals and reptiles because it allows the body to get more oxygen. This surely benefited the dinosaurs that lived in an anoxic atmosphere (Stephen J. Bodio, AllAboutBirds.org).
Not only is this new information really cool for artists and dinosaur enthusiasts, but this helps us to understand the link between birds and dinosaurs and it demonstrates evidence of evolution.
It’s interesting how over time, we keep discovering how much closer Dinosaurs were to birds than lizards. Your post reminded me of hearing how they had to change the effects for the raptors in the original Jurassic Park movie to make the raptors act more like birds than lizards. You can see in thisprevisualization of an iconic scene from the first movie, how the raptors used their tongues like lizards, an effect that had to be changed in the final film, due to a discovery of dinosaurs being more closely related to birds. It’s interesting that 25 years later, we are finding that they’re even closer to birds than we originally thought.
I had seen this pop up earlier in the year on my facebook wall, but passed it off as a hoax article. After reading this I decided to snoop around and try and figure out why dinosaurs may have had feathers and sadly scientists do not know, but this article from the guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/science/lost-worlds/2013/jun/05/dinosaurs-fossils) tries to hypothesise why they might have had feathers.