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Old 07-May-2008, 08:18 PM
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Kullat Nunu Kullat Nunu is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Neverfly View Post
I hate to admit this...

But whenever I see Jurrasic Park or Dinosaur etc...

The dinosaurs always look... BALD to me...

They should have feathers...
Indeed, they (the velociraptors) look like frogs or something. Gigantic, wrong species (Deinonychus), hands are totally wrong, flexible tail... I don't think I can watch the movie anymore.

The bigger dinosaur species were certainly featherless. AFAIK only duck-billed dinosaur skin impressions are found, and they show no feathers but scales. Which is sensible since they are only distantly related to maniraptorians and feathers would have been disadvantageous for a large animal.

Interestingly, although no evidence of fur has been found in the fossils of "mammal-like reptiles" (which were not reptiles, and in many ways more mammal-like than reptile-like), it is known they did not have scales. Maybe they actually had fur but the hairs were shed after death (cf. mammoth remains)? Anyway, there is some evidence that these critters had whiskers. Mammal-like indeed. Imagine furry little (and not at all so little) animals in the Permian, tens of millions of years before the first dinosaurs walked on Earth. So the post-KT world was not a new situation, but return to normality.
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