Death of a Darwinian Icon: T. Rex Did Not Have Feathers, Fossil Evidence Suggests

No feathers.





Joel Kontinen

Some museums and textbooks (as well as Wikipedia, of course) have put feathers on T. rex although there is no fossil evidence that these huge reptiles ever sported them.

Recently, Dr Phil Bell (University of New England, Australia) and colleagues published a paper in the journal Biology Letters, examining skin impressions from a famous T. rex skeleton known as Wyrex.

They found no evidence of feathers.

In contrast, they found “scaly reptilian-like skin.”

However, belief in feathered dinosaurs will probably not become extinct in the very near future. Some experts have already come up with excuses for why this T. rex lacks the fluffiness they expected to see.

The Darwinian community has had to face serious problems in recent years with the discovery of Arctic dinosaurs, as well as soft tissue (that has almost become the norm) and radiocarbon (C-14) in dinosaur bone, which in effect falsifies belief in millions of years.

In addition, we have learnt that some dinosaur species never even existed.

Source:

Briggs, Helen. 2017. Study casts doubt on the idea of 'big fluffy T. rex' BBC News (7 June).

And Birds Are ….

Joel Kontinen

Dinosaurs. At least this is what the American Museum of Natural History declares with letters as high as a pheasant. It is somewhat harder to find any hard evidence for this claim.

Most evolutionists are reluctant to let go of their pet theories. In their view, with the passing of millions and millions of years Tyrannosaurus rex eventually evolved into the finch we see at our bird feeder.

In reality, even many evolutionists find this hypothesis untenable. Turning scales into feathers is a such a feat that poor ol’ natural selection might find it too hard, and mutations mind not be of much use, either.

In 2005 the prestigious journal Nature suggested that at least some ducks, chickens and ratite birds co-existed with dinosaurs. More recently, scientists at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor examined the rate of mutation of different species with the help of the molecular clock and concluded that dinosaurs and modern birds lived at the same time.

It nevertheless seems that old slogans show little evidence of change. At least in secular natural history museums.

Read more about the recent research here.

Read about older research on birds here.