RSS Feed
April 5th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
“They were more like the fuzzy down of a modern baby chick than the stiff
plumes of an adult bird.”
The fossils include part of the Yutyrannus tail and, most valuably, its skull.
They reveal the sharp teeth, three-fingered hand and pointed head of a typical
theropod – a carnivore that walked on its hind legs.
At adult size, a Yutyrannus would have been about 30 feet long and weighed
around 1.4 tons, with feathers at least six inches long.
That makes it a midget compared to its cousin T. rex but a giant compared to
the Beipiaosaurus, the previous plumed record-breaker, which was 40 times
lighter.
Yutyrannus was too big to fly and in any case the feathers were too downy to
even get it off the ground, says the paper.
That raises the theory that the feathers evolved for insulation at what was an
unusually cool time of the long Cretaceous era.
But another idea is that the feathers were there for display, as birds use
them for mating purposes.
The nearly complete skeletons came from the Yixian Formation in Liaoning,
which has been a treasure trove of dinosaurs.
Discoveries there have bolstered the theory that birds today are the
descendants of small feathered theropods that took to the trees, either for
food or safety, and then learned to glide or fly.
“Yutyrannus dramatically increases the size range of dinosaurs for which
we have definite evidence of feathers,” Xu said.
“It’s possible that feathers were much more widespread, at least among
the meat-eating dinosaurs, than most scientists would have guessed even a
few years ago.”
Source: AFP
Related posts:
Views: 0
Posted in 
Tags: 
