Re: Feathered Tyrannosaur?????

[Nick Longrich <nrlongri@midway.uchicago.edu>]

>Hey,
>What do you all make out of this newsreport, which I found on two
>newspaper sites?  It claims that a family in Montana found a "feathered
>tyrannosaur" near Choteau.  Of course, Bakker is in the middle of this too.
>
>Steve
>
>Here goes:
>
>      STEVENSVILLE, Mont.  Officials of a Florida museum say Montana's
>Rocky Mountain
>               front has yielded what they believe to be an unknown
>species of meat-eating dinosaur, a
>               feathered raptor in the Tyrannosaurus rex family.

        I don't see anything wrong here- I mean, no direct evidence of
feathers in T. rex. But then, there is no evidence of scales, either, and
evidence of feathers (okay, protofeathers) in a more basal form-
Sinosauropteryx- would suggest that Tyrannosaurus was indeed
(proto)feathered. So I think that's all that's going on here. Bakker is
just saying  that in life the critter they've discovered was feathered, and
there's no direct evidence from this specimen, but he's in all likelihood
correct. This would be analogous to reporting "warm-blooded tyrannosaur
found" even if we didn't have the warm blood...
        But yeah, pretty confusing so I think the science reporter maybe
could've clarified stuff a bit.

        -N