Hey guys, just a heads up: if you, or anyone you know, knows how to code (particularly the animation side of things), we'd love to get more coders on our team!
Jurassic Park still got a lot of stuff wrong, even where it's not obvious (the T. rex's head shape, for example); virtually every dinosaur in the movie has some mistakes. It's always best to use professional reconstructions, like those of Scott Hartman, whenever possible.
This this picture (just one I found on the internet) kinda shows the extent of feathers on our Spino; they're short and similar to those of penguins. Or you could interpret it as being featherless; the skin could be seen either way.
True, but there's lots of different types of venom, most of which aren't all that similar, and producing a single chemical is a lot easier than evolving a complex structure like a feather. A better example would be eyes, but eyes are an incredibly valuable and important structure to have, so it makes sense that they'd evolve from multiple sources. And again, each type of eye works very differently from other types.
Feathers are VERY complex structures and it's virtually impossible that they evolved twice. If both ornithopods and theropods had them, then they were almost certainly basal to dinosauria. This means that all dinosaurs without feathers (such as sauropods) lost them at some point, rather than not having any to begin with. It's the same logic that lets us assume that the common ancestor of all mammals was furry, since even unrelated mammals have fur.
Ok, I can't keep quiet anymore... Feathers were not a basal feature of all dinosaurs, quills were. In fact, quills were a basal feature of archosaurs in general (looking at you pterosaurs). Feathers are more complicated form of quills and appear only in a group of theropods called coelurosaurs, in which are Tyrannosauridae and Dromaeosauridae. Spinosauridae, on the other hand, isn't in coelurosauria just like Allosauridae and Carcharodontosauridae. So unless there is a find that shows that theropods outside of coelurosauria had feathers, they didn't.
Kulindadromeus has advanced, bird-like feathers, and it's an ornithopod. It proves that ornithopod fluff and theropod feathers are homologous, and therefore that feathers are basal to dinosauria.
Ehh...stretching it a bit. It's still unclear whether feathers were a basal trait for all dinosaurs.
Well, we know that they were present in both ornithopods and theropods, and crocodilians have a variant of the gene that responsible for feather development, so they're definitely a basal trait for dinosaurs, if not archosaurs in general.
Animals get cold a lot faster in water than in air, even if they're at the same temperature. If you look at aquatic/amphibious warm-blooded animals, they all have either insulating fur/feathers or thick fat deposits; it's unlikely that spinosaurs had the latter, since they would overheat in warm climates (also, birds and reptiles don't store fat in the same way mammals do). Feathers are a better option, since they can be puffed out or flattened to change their insulative properties. Granted, animals as large as Spinosaurus probably didn't need much insulation, but smaller animals like Baryonyx might have.
Uh... This update REALLY broke my game... There's unloaded chunks everywhere and blocks are refusing to visually update (I'll break one, but it'll still look like it's there). Is anyone else having this problem?
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I'll see if I can find time to do one; I've been a little busy lately.
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Kulindadromeus has advanced, bird-like feathers, and it's an ornithopod. It proves that ornithopod fluff and theropod feathers are homologous, and therefore that feathers are basal to dinosauria.
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Well, we know that they were present in both ornithopods and theropods, and crocodilians have a variant of the gene that responsible for feather development, so they're definitely a basal trait for dinosaurs, if not archosaurs in general.
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