I like feathered dinosaurs. I like imagining them being very colorful!
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
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Fun fact, they've done studies searching for pigments and found that dinosaur eggs, at least, were colorful like modern bird eggs.
I am saddened that we will probably never know about not only all the cool colors and feathers that dinosaurs had, but also the various fleshy structures that they also probably had.
We do, actually! Recent research proved there are melanosomes in some fossils/imprints, which were previously thought to be bacteria. This gives us a fairly good idea of the colouring of certain species. Check out this sinosauropteryx:
I highly recommend reading the book Dinosaurs: New Visions of a Lost World. It's fun to read, has amazing illustrations and was written by one of the people who discovered this.
This is what I imagine an owlbear looked like
That is so cool!
That guy looks fren shaped.
You want fren shaped? Check out this cutie!
Half moth, half frog, half cheetah!
1.5 fren
Mogtah? Cheemog?
Dope, I'm adding this to my reading list!
The author of this book, Professor Benton has done talks on this https://youtu.be/ICzc8D0zQC0
Nice, thanks!
Just ordered the book. Thank you!
Aww, he is so cute. What a good boy.
Wait
Is that fur?
Feathers, but very simple filament-like ones. Remember - feathers haven't evolved for flight. No idea how cuddly they were (you'd have to ask a paleontologist), but I'm just going to assume "extremely".
What's the difference between simple filament like feathers and hair?
Composition? I tried googling it. Found an article which says that while hair is made of keratin, feathers are also made of keratin, but the keratin is different.
¯\_(ツ)_¯
Maybe someone who knows what they are talking about will chime in. I am not that person.
I imagine it’s rather like bird hatchling down, which is very structurally basic, and if so, it’s very brittle, and makes for a lot of dust.
Thanks for the clarification!
I for one like theropod chickens.
Scaling up a regular chicken always seemed more realistic & intimidating.
From my understanding, existing fossilized skin evidence suggests that T. rex had few feathers, if any.
Edit: I mean adult T. rex
T. rex was unfeathered (or at least the adults were) but other members of the Tyrannosaurus family were partly or fully feathered. Yutyrannus, for example.
It was the trend then.
10/10 would revenge-crap on your car.
Imagine a T-Rex, bobbing its head while walking around, like a chicken
Well, no, not that fast due to it's size & weight of the head, but maybe having it's eyes closed while moving the head to not tax the brain too much (that chicken bobbing was a solution to allow the brain to be smaller & more efficient bcs the effort to simply stabilise the head & process only the image/objects in 3D space while only those objects are moving is way simpler & more efficient than calculating the POV's movements & accounting for those in real time too - it's why hunting predators usually have large brains, if you miss data at high speeds you'll just run into a tree).
This doesn't make any sense when you consider that birds hold their heads still while flying and are very good at spotting things on the ground while doing it. The reason I know for why birds bob their heads is that they can't move their eyes in their sockets. So they both their head forward the same way our eyes will jump from position to position rather than move smoothly, it minimizes the blur you get from rapid movements.
When flying all objects are fairly far so it's like their POV isn't really moving (it's not a yes/no, it's by how much).
(A stupid example: you can read big road signs while shaking you head but not as easily from a paper in front of you. The movement of your head is smaller relative to the sign. Or why when taking pics of the stars it doesn't matter if the exposure is 12+h even if Earth has moved so much around the sun in that time.)
On the ground the distances are a lot smaller & more relevant. So chickens stabilise their had in fixed spots as much as possible (and "don't look" while bobbing).
If they bobbed their had bcs of their limited eye socket movement (they can move them a little, some species a lot) they wouldn't do it when not changing the direction of where they are looking.
(It's prob also why you can hypnotise a chicken in a second with one move of your finger but not eg a parrot with more brain buffer.)
But we all do it, humans (prob mammals) have this trick when you "lose time" when calm & moving the eyes and/or head from one object to another. We don't perceive it as such unless you look for it (you don't remember the details of the panning even when you know it took you a few tenths of a second - but you do when eg playing sports). A bit like you stop processing your nose in your fov. Or how you don't really remember having your eyelids closed when blinking.
Anybody that's grown up around chickens knows how terrifying a territorial rooster can be.
Ikr? A big chicken would eat me like a snack just opportunistically (maybe some ultra specialised species like pigeons wouldn't, but chickens def would, they eat everything).
"I like my imagination more than I like learning about nature"
Feathers are fucking rad and I can't wait for more weird critter traits
Chickens are awful creatures, a giant one would fuck you up for absolutely no reason
This is chicken slander, they're chill af once you get them to trust you.
Roosters are demons though.
Beware the giant cock!
I saw a chicken the other day. Horrible creatures.
Chickens are awful creatures, a giant one would fuck you up for absolutely no reason
But if we Jurassic park these mutherfuckers I guarantee KFC would start serving up Kentucky Fried Dinosaur.
Man they'd probably taste fricken awesome. And the occasional news story of a battery farm of dinosaurs getting mass released into the environment, towns getting overrun by giant feathered dinosaurs would be a sight to see.
Just finished watching The Dinosaurs series, narrated by Morgan Freeman. I enjoyed the series overall, though I do find it difficult to suspend my disbelief and stop wondering what shit they completely made up, what has a firm scientific basis, and the extent to which the current understanding will be laughable in 20 years.
Just like fashion, it’s cyclical.
Forgot about prehensile eye stalks and stank glands, tho
Also cloacal vent ridges. Lots of those
Ok, but why the faces?