If i say penguin fur, everyone knows what that means. If i say downy feathers, everyone knows what that means. So my best guess would be their fur would look more like penguin fur than mammal fur, and have less length because this wouldn’t be neededĪ good writer writes for his audience not to sound smart. The ultimate insulating shape for feathers is what penguins have- loose feathery interconnected insulation above the skin, and the tips of the feather form a solid barrier to air and water, keeping the insulation layer protected and warm. So instead of trapping air length-ways like hair has to, feathers can insulate across-ways as well. They may not have looked like hair as much as the photo does, because what feathers do well that hair doesn’t is spread out. It would have had feathers that insulate it well. Dinosaur feathers (and feathers of pterosaurs etc) were much closer to chick feathers except for specific feather evolution of display feathers and flight feathersĭinosaurs were warm blooded and pachyrhinosaurus is a dinosaur that lived around the arctic circle. Keep in mind that flight feathers are a specific evolution in one branch of therapods, we think of flight feathers when we think of feathers, because birds today all have them. It won’t be true hair, it will be long downy feathers So it's a common belief that Pachyrhinosaurus must've had some sort of insulation - like a covering of proto-feathers or something similar! And while there's no direct evidence - there rarely is for this sort of thing - it's good to speculate. While this is mostly due to a difference in being warm or cold blooded, reptiles also have no integument and thus very poor insulation. You generally don't find reptiles in cold environments. We have concrete proof of dinosaurs like Psittacosaurus, a more basal ceratopsian, having a little hair on the top of their tail so it's feasible the smaller members of Ceratopsia had the same sort of thing!Īs for Pachyrhinosaurus, it lived in very cold environments in life. The idea of feathered or furred ceratopsians is a fairly popular one as far as speculation goes. It's a popular belief among the paleontological community that proto-feathers or some sort of hair-like structures are ancestral to Dinosauria and perhaps even Archosauria in general as they appear in so many different places - it's more feasible that some groups lost the covering they had before instead of the same protofeathers evolving a ludicrous amount of times in the whole group.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |