Tyrannosaurus rex: everyone's favorite dinosaur, right?

[Darwin_s_Finch]

@Sailboat

It appears to me that the Zuul crurivastator images we’ve seen links to recently do appear to have both spikes and a tail club.

A lot can change in 7 years Policanthidae, for example, isn’t really a thing anymore, with ankylosaurs now belonging to one of two main groups: ankylosaurids or nodosaurids. And the relative spikiness doesn’t really separate the two groups, though the tail club has still only been found in ankylosaurids Zuul being an ankylosaurid, of course).

[Jophiel]

Vindication for the noble, and naked, Tyrannosaurus Rex.

A new study in the journal Biology Letters crushes any tyrant chicken dreams: T. rex was covered in scales. The new research “shows without question that T. rex had scaly skin,” study author Phil R. Bell, a paleontologist at Australia’s University of New England, said in an email to The Washington Post.
[…]
ell and his colleagues examined skin from T. rex and four relatives from fairly late in tyrannosaur history: Albertosaurus, Daspletosaurus, Gorgosaurus and Tarbosaurus. Tyrannosaur skin is rare, Bell said, in part because paleontologists historically favored smashing through skin to get to bones.

From these skin patches, representing the tyrannosaur abdomen, chest, pelvis, neck and tail, the researchers found nothing but scales. If feathers existed, they did so only along the animals’ back or spines.