Oh for sure, without a doubt. Hell it took forever for people to figure out feathers.
Then again, on rare occasion we do get some cool skin/soft tissue evidence like that Nodosaurus in Canada. Sometimes they’re strikingly similar to what we thought (or not?). I am not a paleontologist and I am speaking out of my ass.
That Nodosaurus is super cool though, y’all should see it.
Behold, the common ancestor between the deadly T-Rex and the common beaver. You can tell they’re related due to the tiny arms, upright stance, and fierce demeanor.
Mammals only got yeeted to their own evolutionary tree branch 40 million years prior to those that would be considered reptilian (sorta dinos too) which was somewhere in the realm of 250 million years ago.
Meaninng the reptiles of today are ~5x further apart in time from dinosaurs, than dinosaurs are from their common ancestors to mammals.
I think we really should just not bother thinking in terms of current speciation concepts. They could have had jellyfish like tentacles dangling allover their skin and we’d never know.
Mammals only got yeeted to their own evolutionary tree branch 40 million years prior to those that would be considered reptilian (sorta dinos too) which was somewhere in the realm of 250 million years ago.
As someone who was raised and taught to believe that the earth was only a few thousand years old (by ‘that kind’ of Christians/churches,) this still blows my mind to read! I’ve known what I was taught was bullshit for at least around fifteen years, but it’s like my little pea brain still just cannot compute it. Wild stuff!!
In October, he was one of nine senators to vote against legislation intended to outlaw flag burning and other forms of flag defacement and joined Bob Dole and Orrin Hatch, the other two Republicans to vote against the bill,
That’s awesome. At least he stood for free speech…
in voicing a preference for a constitutional amendment.
This is still not something we can answer with certainty. For a couple of years there, paleontology thought that psittacosaurus had feathers on its tail - and as a ceratopsian, on the complete other side of the dinosaur ‘tree’, that would suggest the base form for dinosaurs must have feathers and any that didn’t have them lost them at some point in their lineage (and thus could potentially regain them if the DNA was deactivated rather than lost). Now the feathers are disputed again, as “something else” - spines of some sort unrelated to feathers.
No doubt lots of dinosaurs were scaly, but I don’t think anyone would say with certainty that feathers were limited to late theropods.
I’ve also heard some contention over the ground up evolutionary theory for birds. Mainly that you don’t evolve flight from jumping up, but rather from jumping tree to tree and gliding. I’m certainly not an expert in this but as a layman it does make sense to me, if you jump to escape a predator on the ground you inevitably come back down, but if you can make it to the next tree and your predator can’t, that would indeed be a significant enough advantage to be passed down to your children. Seems easier to convert lizardy gliders like on the yi qi to wings too, rather than lizardy arms to wings.
Proto-feathers (basically hair) were basal to dinosaurs + pterosaurs, we have evidence for feathers on some dinosaurs (micro raptor had iridescent black feathers), fuzz on others (Psittacosaurus has long “quills” on its backend), and scales on others (Carnotosaurus, Diplodocus, large portion of T-Rex)
The idea right now is that the smaller ones probably had feathers, bigger ones had scales, unless they’re from China, then everything has feathers
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