Discover the dinosaur with feathers more large history

(www.neomundo.com.ar/_SINC) “It’s the dinosaur with feathers of which we have evidence direct fossils”, says researcher Corwin Sullivan, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, to contextualize the three skeletons of Yutyrannus huali (tyrannosaurids family) have been found in Northeast China.

The long feathers and filamentous are the most significant feature of this species that lived 65 million years ago. The direct evidence of the presence of giant feathered dinosaurs, which is published this week in Nature, says “new perspectives on the evolution of the early pen”.

The paper describes three exemplary of the tyrannosaurid family, who have been baptized with the name of Yutyrannus huali, which means ’beautiful pen tyrant’.

Unlike his relatives, has three toes on the Forelegs and a typical foot of theropod, which corresponds to a suborder of dinosaur.

One of three copies is an adult that would have measured about nine meters with a weight of more than one ton, in particular 1,400 kilograms, while the rest are young individuals with half size.

Is relatively smaller than Tyrannosaurus rex but weighs 40 times more than the feathered dinosaur large described above.

FEATHERED Giants

Typically, large animal retains heat more easily. “The mammals of great dimensions, such as elephants, tend to lack hair for this reason, especially if they live in warm climates”, says Sullivan.

Hence the interest of the discovery that Sullivan published in Nature: “this type of animals tend to have overheating problems, so walk with a fur coat is counterproductive”.

The difficulty of finding feathers in the fossil record made him think to Sullivan that “large dinosaurs lacked insulation”.

The Yutyrannus lived in the early Cretaceous, relatively colder than the rest of the geologic period that was the moment in which appeared the T. rex. “Despite their body mass, surely would have needed their feathers to keep warm”, says Sullivan.

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