November 23, 2011 From museum displays to comic books and
feature films, Tyrannosaurus rex has been celebrated as one of
the biggest, meanest and ugliest predatory dinosaurs of all
time. The image of this long-extinct carnivore as the apex of
the apex predators has a nearly unstoppable amount of cultural
inertia. Maybe that’s why people get upset when paleontologists
and artists suggest that the tyrant dinosaur was at least partly
covered in a coat of feathers. (Cracked.com even listed an
illustration of a feathered Tyrannosaurus as one of “17 Images
That Will Ruin Your Childhood.”) Such images make it seem as if
the old “prize-fighter of antiquity” has gone soft—how could
such an imposing predator go in for such a silly look?
Tyrannosaurus was no turkey, right? To date, no one has found
the fossilized remnants of feathers with a Tyrannosaurus
skeleton. A few patches of scaly skin are known from some big
tyrannosaur specimens, and those scraps represent about all we
know for sure about the body covering of th