No one can drink from the firehose of infinite information blasting into our world every day, so it’s easy to miss something interesting when it gets presented.
Here’s one of those things. Most dinosaurs probably had feathers.
Maybe their feathers weren’t just like the feathers we know today , though some probably were.
All of the birds around us today are really descendants of dinosaurs that have survived this far – their larger brethren didn’t make it.
Many of the large dinosaurs probably had feathers, at the least as juveniles when they were small and vulnerable. It could have been that the feathers helped them flap up a tree trunk to escape danger. Then as they matured they lost most of their youthful plumage.
Before this, I always imagined dinosaurs as having a smooth tough hide, something like thick toad skin.
Like a heart or a lung, a feather rarely gets preserved, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t there. Occasionally, feathers did get preserved along with supporting structures for feathers or something like them. There are fossils records of what we’d call “Chicken skin” where the bumps in the skin probably supported feathers.
Much of this is informed speculation by scientists who’re trying to put together the real picture of dinosaurs. But who knows, if there’s ever a follow up to Jurassic Park, will the big scary T Rex and the velociraptors look a bit fluffy?