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viridiformica t1_iybbad0 wrote

Welcome to one of the most hotly debated topics in palaeontology. Feathers, hair, skin, etc rarely survive as fossils, so evidence is sparse. Some people will argue that keratin filaments (not really modern feathers, but more like single strands of fiber that later developed into feathers in some species) are a basal feature of dinosaurs, and so potentially all of them could have been 'feathered' at least on parts of their body, or at certain stages in their life. Others will argue that this feature has developed multiple times, and that features actually related to feathers are restricted to a fairly small group of dinosaurs

Just about all you can conclusively say is that some families were predominantly covered in feathers, and others were predominantly covered in scaly hide similar to reptiles (sidenote: reptile doesn't really have a scientific meaning, as any formal definition would probably have to include birds as well)

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SirSpoonicus t1_iybiddh wrote

I recently went on a museum tour led by a paleontologist. He told us every sample of dermal soft tissue recovered from raptors had feathers. So, the family thing makes a lot of sense.

'Dinosaur' also encompasses several hundred millions of years of land dwelling creatures so the variety of animal is immense. Just look at the variety of bird we have recorded in the last 3000 years. Or how many times crabs have evolved. Multiple evolutions of feathers or types of animal with feathers makes sense.

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eob3257 t1_iybqevn wrote

What is a scientific distinction between feathered one and scaly one? I mean, modern birds have scaly legs too.

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Busy_Bitch5050 t1_iybv66v wrote

> any formal definition would probably have to include birds as well

Aside from the Linnaean classification system, birds are categorized as reptiles, no?

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English_Joe t1_iyc9aph wrote

What advantage do we hypothesise these keratin filaments would have granted and therefore been preserved?

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