Illustration by Brian Choo via Nature Published April 4, 2012
Paleontologists already knew that some members of the group of
dinosaurs to which T. rex belonged, called theropods, were
feathered. But most of the known feathered dinos were relatively
small. "It was a question mark whether larger relatives of these
small theropods were also feathered," said study team member
Corwin Sullivan, a paleontologist at the Chinese Academy of
Sciences in Beijing. "We simply didn't have data either way,
because soft-tissue preservation of any kind is so rare." Now
three tyrannosauroid fossils—one adult and two juveniles—offer
clear proof that giant theropods could also be feathered. Their
feathers were simple filaments, more like the fuzzy down of a
modern baby chick than the stiff plumes of an adult bird. The
new dinosaur species, detailed in this week's issue of the
journal Nature, has been named Yutyrannus huali—a Latin-Mandarin
mash-up that means "beautiful feathered tyrant." The three
125-million-year-old specimens w