>>57244029The Ice Mosasaur is excellent and so are the Dunkleosteus and stegosaurus. The raptor is kinda eh because we already have 2 theropods, but still different enough that I wouldn't be mad about it. The chimera stuff I get thematically, but I don't enjoy.
>>57243867You can think whatever you want, the evidence is that they are at most as feathery as a whale is hairy. Unless you mean something else by "closest ancestor", you should know that there is no evidence that Tyrannosaurus is descended from Yutyrannus and while it is generally found that they share common ancestry, there is such a large distance in time between the two that this relationship is inferred statistically (with giant error bars) rather than proven through an uninterrupted lineage. The skin patches we have from the Tyrannosaurids would show us the hair follicles on a humpback,and represent at least a portion of every chunk of anatomy, but they don't show any evidence of feather follicles.
Feathers are a thorny problem in paleontology, because either it's easy for them to be "lost" or its easy for them to be evolved, and either way you choose it, it happened in dozens of places in the family tree of archosauria, the annoying problem with the people who believe in feathered rex is that they are trusting phylogenetic bracketing more than they trust the physical evidence for the integument of the animal. The first described skin impressions for tyrannosaurid dinosaurs predates the idea that feathers were more widespread in dinosaurs than just the maniraptorians, so even from the first moment that we realized that it is more likely than not that Tyrannosaurus rex was descended from ancestors that probably had feathers, we already knew that the actual animal had to be largely scaly, not feathered.
This is why it ticks off people serious about paleontology, feathered T.rex is the artist telling us not to trust our lying eyes.
