![]() “Oh, how the mighty have fallen!” mourned one WIRED commenter, and elsewhere, Yutyrannus was presented as a “fuzzball” and “ chicken from hell.” And while the outrage was not as great as when people mistakenly believed that paleontologists were trying to kill Triceratops, at least some dinosaur fans lamented the increasingly avian aspect of tyrannosaurs.Ī restoration of Yutyrannus, with the therizinosaurs Beipiaosaurus in the foreground, by Brian Choo. ![]() Why are paleontologists so committed to destroying the fantastic imagery Jurassic Park embedded in our cultural landscape? Across the web, tyrannosaur traditionalists registered their displeasure. “Tyrannosaurs were supposed to be scaly,” came the cantankerous cry from die-hard fans of more reptilian dinosaurs. The tyrant king may not have been the wholly scaly monstrosity I grew up knowing, but an apex predator decorated by patches of simple protofeathers. And if an imposing predator like Yutyrannus sported a fuzzy coat, the same might be true for the theropod’s notorious cousin, Tyrannosaurus rex. While most of the feathered dinosaurs discovered so far have been very small and often quite bird-like animals, Yutyrannus was a roughly 30-foot-long bruiser which showed that even huge predators might have sported fluffy plumage. The dinosaur, dubbed Yutyrannus, was a confirmation of an idea that researchers and artists had been cautiously exploring for years. At this rate Long & Schouten may have to issue an expanded edition in a few years to keep up with all the new discoveries, but for now their book is one of the best popular summaries of feathered dinosaurs available.When I first heard the news that paleontologists had discovered a giant, fuzzy tyrannosaur, I was giddy with excitement. It is a book that could not have possibly been published 20, 10, or even 5 years ago, and since its publication last fall several more feathered dinosaurs have been announced. These criticisms aside, Feathered Dinosaurs is a wonderful book that features some of the most beautiful restorations of dinosaurs I have ever seen. This is perhaps a minor point, but readers do often wonder how paleontologists and artists restore dinosaurs from fragmentary remains. It would also have been nice to see a skeletal restoration of each dinosaur included with the descriptions to show how much of each genus has actually been found. The restorations of the tyrannosauroids, in particular, have a few mistakes (like the overemphasized brow horns on Albertosaurus). His illustrations alone are worth the price of the book, and each painting is accompanied by an artist's note explaining how each dinosaur was reconstructed.Īdmittedly a few of the drawings needed a little more work. If you have studiously kept up with every new discovery, then much of this information will be familiar-but the real selling point of this book are the absolutely gorgeous illustrations by Peter Schouten. They survey a wide swath of coelurosaurs and provide a brief sketch of each genus. If the concept of feathered dinosaurs is new to you, Long & Schouten's book is not a bad place to start. Surely there are still more discoveries to be made, but perhaps the best general review of the present collection of plumage-covered dinosaurs can be found in John Long and Peter Schouten's recently published Feathered Dinosaurs: The Origin of Birds. There can no longer be any reasonable doubt that birds are living dinosaurs, and the fossil record has made it clear that many "bird" characteristics appeared first in dinosaurs. ![]() Since that time, paleontologists have been inundated by a flood of feathered dinosaur fossils. The hypothesis that birds evolved from small, predatory dinosaurs was still being hotly debated, and it would be another seven years before the first non-avian feathered dinosaur, Sinosauropteryx, was found. Paul published Predatory Dinosaurs of the World in 1989, the idea that many theropod dinosaurs might have been covered in feathers was still controversial. ![]()
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