Why
we like to believe that dinosaurs were scaly
Once thought to be terrifying, scaly lizards,
it now seems dinosaurs were actually more like birds. But not everyone's ready
to accept their new image, writes Mary Colwell. "All Brontosauruses are
thin at one end, much, much thicker in the middle and then thin again at the
far end," declared the pedantic Miss Anne Elk in the famous Monty Python
sketch more than 40 years ago. Miss Elk's observation still holds fast, but
many of our other opinions about dinosaurs have changed.The word
"dinosaur" is made from the combination of two Greek words,
"deinos" which means terrible or fearfully great, and
"saur" which means lizard. It was first used in 1842 by the
palaeontologist Richard Owen who saw some similarities between huge fossil
bones and the skeletons of living reptiles.He suggested "establishing a
distinct tribe or sub-order of Saurian Reptiles, for which I would propose the
name of Dinosauria".
And further down the page “Much intellectual blood has been shed in the
corridors of paleontological research institutes over the years as evidence has
been amassed to show that dinosaurs were highly varied in size and behaviour,
and more like birds than reptiles.
"All the evidence is that dinosaurs were warm-blooded," says Mike
Benton, professor of palaeontology at Bristol University. "When you look
at the bone histology [structure] you see they had growth patterns and
replacement of bone very like mammals and birds…
Many if not most
dinosaurs had feathers." Many of those feathers were coloured ginger
and white and black.”
Read rest see pics
here :
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33678744
Would dinosaurs be less scary with
feathers? Probably but they would still have sharp teeth so not for cuddling. Does
this mean some cryptids may have feathers? Some cryptids are believed to be
relics of past ages and so could be feathered
and not hairy or scaly .It is difficult to tell when you are startled by the
sight of a cryptid and don’t see clearly but it is always possible that feathers
or fine down are mistaken as hair or fur. Just a thought for the weekend .
