BY MARGARET MUNRO
Montreal-Gazette
A giant feathered tyrannosaur has been unearthed in China, the largest creature — living or extinct — known to sport a downy coat.
The carnivore, which grew up to nine metres long, likely looked “downright shaggy,” says Corwin Sullivan, a Canadian paleontologist on the team that unveiled the creature Wednesday.
Three specimens of the dinosaur, which the scientists have called Yutyrannus huali for “beautiful feathered tyrant,” have been uncovered in northeastern China.
One was an adult estimated to have weighed 1.414 tonnes, 40 times bigger than any previously found feathered dinosaur. And two juveniles tipped the scales at about half a tonne.
The ancient bones were found by fossil traders and brought to museums where paleontologists realized their significance, which is detailed in the journal Nature this week.
The discovery “provides solid evidence for the existence of gigantic feathered dinosaurs,” reports the team led by Xu Xing, at Beijing’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology.
The scientists say the creature did not actually fly which would have been impossible given its large size — far bigger than the average cow — and the downy structure of its feathers. But they say the feathers may have had an important function as insulation because the creatures lived about 125 million years ago when global temperatures took a dip.
“The average temperature would have been about 10 degrees C,” says Sullivan, an associate professor at the Beijing paleontology institute.
“That is perhaps not too different from northern China today,” he says, but was an “unusually cool” period in the age of the dinosaurs.
Tyrannosaurus rex, which was larger and roamed a much warmer world, is not believed to have had any feathers though the researchers don’t rule it out.
“It’s possible that some dinosaurs that were even bigger had feathers but we can’t tell one way or the other because most dinosaurs are known only from bones,” Sullivan said in an interview from Beijing.
While the feather preservation on the three specimens “is patchy,” the team says the creatures had plenty of long, filamentous feathered plumage.
“They would have looked superficially more like hair than the feathers of modern birds,” says Sullivan, who describes the downy creature as quite a carnivore.