To clarify, while many theropod dinosaurs (like dromeosaurs) did have feathers, not all of them did, and Tyrannosaurus rex most likely did not—at least not adults.
I think there’s a weird dichotomy when it comes to dinosaurs where some people think none of them had feathers and some people think all of them did.
We know for a fact that certain dinosaurs such as ankylosaurs did not have feathers because we have well-preserved skin impressions.
While it’s true we really have no real certainty of what most living dinosaurs looked like, T. rex probably didn’t look the way it’s portrayed in the above image. Even if it was covered in feathers, it wouldn’t just look like a scaled-up chicken with seemingly giant feathers seen in this depiction.
Chickens don't even look like this when they're not selectively bred over generations to maximise their meat.
To add to your point:
When it comes to whether Tyrannosaurus rex had feathers, it's conceivable that they might have had them, since we know that feathers were a fairly common trait among other advanced theropods, as well as more basal ones, but it's just as likely they didn't have them since we've found no evidence to suggest they did.
If T. rex had feathers, they wouldn't have resembled those of modern birds, because modern bird feathers are largely either very well adapted for flight, or are derived from flight feathers. And we know that neither T. rex nor it's ancestors could fly.
I'm not a paleontologist though, I just have a background in marine evolutionary biology and I'm also a massive nerd.
They have discovered skin impressions that were a bumpy scale variety with no feathers, no really substantial sized impressions per se but what we've discovered would hint at then being featherless. They have found substantial skin impressions of carnotaurus, a distant cousin and they didn't have any so there's reason to think they had no feathers.
However if they did discover an impression that had feathers it wouldn't be terribly surprising either
If they were feathered at all, it probably would have been sparse--at least in adults--like the fur of elephants. They would have had trouble overheating if they were fully covered.
Chickens don't even look like this when they're not selectively bred over generations to maximise their meat.
True, but I don't see why that's particularly relevant here. The hypothetical "chubby" look of the T-rex being shown here would be caused by the fluff of the feathers, which is common to many birds, including non-domesticated ones. For example, a wet owl looks super scrawny when wet, because most of the visible size is just feathers. All this image does is taking the normal body size of a T-Rex, pick a proportional feather length, and show how it'd look with them. Incidentally, it kinda looks like a chicken, which unlike many non-domesticated birds don't have as much feather fluff but actual body mass.
That said, I agree that T-rex likely didn't have feathers, and that if it did it likely would still look different due to the different nature of the feathers (although the fluff of birds' feathers also helps with insulation and to look bigger and thus scarier, so it could be possible dinosaur feathers could also have evolved to have a similar effect and eventually further evolved into flight feathers, but I'm completely speculating here).
Neither chickens nor the chickens undomesticated ancestor likely could fly, but feathers are a useful adaptation even without contributing to flight; insulation, controlled descent from roosting perch, lightweight armor.
Yeah it's like we all realised some historical dinosaurs might’ve been anatomically incorrect and took that to mean that every dinosaur looked totally different to what we used to think. Sometimes we got it pretty close the first time.
A Trex could never be that fat simply because it didn't even have the leg bones and muscular structure to support something that massive. Because, mind you, this would weigh as much as like 2 to 3 full elephants and those use all four of their legs to walk for a reason.
People always immediately jump to ultra fat chickens that were bred to have lots of meat on them and are fed corn meanwhile we had chickens like this fed wheat, grass, and chicken pellets slender chicken
Classic plump chicken beauty standards being pushed on dinosaurs
Uh, the Asil(the breed you linked as a slender chicken) are bred for fighting. That’s not what you’d consider a normal chicken either lol, if you want the most basic, ore domestication chicken specimen look up the red jungle fowl. That’s is the true ancestor to all domestic chickens.
He’s saying that the increased size in the above picture is just from lightweight feathers. The t-Rex is not literally that fat, it’s the same size as we currently conceive of t-rexs, it just has a bunch of fluffy feathers which probably don’t add that much to the total weight.
Oh ok i get you. But, to be pedantic, this image isn't just feathers.
They've made them chicken shaped. Modern chickens look like that because they're very fat and meaty, natural wild chickens and walking birds are still much thinner than this.
Also also, chickens can only be this fat because they're small, due to the squared cubed law. Elephant sized chickens would never work because while your mass increases by the third power*, your muscle power doesn't increase by the same amount. An elephant sized chicken would need to be way way stronger proportionally to work with those proportions
*: idk if that's how you'd say it in english but i mean like the volume in cubed units like with ³
Yeah just like larger mammals like elephants and rhinoceroses are hairless because they are so large. T-rex lived further north but the climate was also much warmer then.
Heat generation is a function of volume (since each cell generates heat) while heat loss is a function of surface area (since heat has to leave through your skin).
Scale a creature up and its volume may increase 8x while it's surface area only 4 due to the square cube law. That means it generates more heat but it's surface area used for cooling does not go up proportionally.
Do we know if the flying ones did? Because I've always assumed they didn't, as their wings have a structure more like the wings of a bat. And there's a cute irony there that one of the only ones we know didn't have feathers are the bird ones
If by "flying ones" you mean pterosaurs (which aren't dinosaurs at all), then yes, they've also been found with feathers. Though they're more likely to be for insulation as they didn't need them for flight.
Birds are flying dinosaurs, so they do have feathers. Pterosaurs aren't dinosaurs, just close relatives, and they had simpler feathers that were more like fur. Their wings were just elongated little fingers, whereas bat wings are the whole hand with the fingers throughout the membrane.
It is overcorrection. No one wants to seem like the shrink wrap losers of the past, so they lean into festhers. Which is a bit boring, to be honest. No enough art leans into colourful skin, fur, patterns and most importantly: fat.
"I think there’s a weird dichotomy when it comes to dinosaurs where some people think none of them had feathers and some people think all of them did."
<---This. I had a girlfriend who somehow came to the conclusion that ALL the dinos had feathers.
This is pretty funny, but it's unlikely to be the case. No matter the age, predators need to be lean and quick, in order to be able to chase down prey. Combined with the fact that T Rex lived in warmer climate, it's very likely it was closer to what we imagined it than a fluffy ball.
It has been found that the trex does not have feather all over the body (imprints of skin on rock fossils).
Having feathers at this large of a body would for sure cause overheating
/uj The other thing that we cannot tell from the fossil record is how fat they were. We usually depict dinosaurs as these skeletal monsters, but most animals have layers of fat and other padding - imagine how much scarier dogs would look if they had no hair and their ribs showed.
So basically, dinosaurs may have looked nothing like we imagine them
This is incorrect. Older paeloart yea did do that, but it's extremely rare now. There's also the fact that skeletons can at least give a clue to where soft tissuing might be, so even if we don't know what exact soft structures some creatures mightve had, there's usually some evidence that those structures were there
This is untrue, paleontoligists know their stuff. They don't just put skin over bone, they look at the osteology and biomechanics of the bones to figure out where the muscles connected and how strong they were, and they model that muscled skeleton in simulations. As it turns out, something particualrly the size of a T-Rex needs to be very muscular and lean to even be able to support its weight, there's really no way you could pile any large amount of subcutaneous fat on them and have them be functioning creatures.
Large dinosaurs were also likely mesothermic gigantotherms based on a bunch of scientific evidence. Which means they were relying on simply being big enough to hold their core body temperature naturally without having to warm their blood actively like we do. They would have had visceral fat around their organs to store energy, but likely little else particularly subcutaneously as overheating would generally be a bigger concern to a large mesothermic creature.
Small dinosaurs are fair game to be fat or feathery as they'd need to keep warm, more likely much more the latter on current evidence. The big fellas not so much.
The original Jurassic Park movie is responsible for solidifying everyone’s featherless perception of dinosaurs, I’ve known people who get legit angry when you tell them that dinos most likely had feathers, because “it makes them look dumb”. Same energy as 3rd graders who believe megalodons are alive and thriving today despite us having zero evidence
We know pretty much for a fact that Trex didn’t have a thick feather coating, it would’ve caused overheating issues for a big animal living in a tropical environment. More likely it would’ve had a sparse feather coating kinda like hair on an elephant. Some of its close relatives like Yutyrannus and Nanuqsaurus did live in colder environments though and probably did have thicker feather coats.
This is something I will be rambling about when I'm a schizo grandpa. Dinosaurs are giant lizards god damnit, and the damn libral world guvnment can take them from my cold dead hands
Except that we know T-Rex specifically didn't have feathers. There was an archeological find a few years back of a skin impression found with it's fossils. The skin impression didn't have any feathers. just skin.
Also, accurate T-Rex is MUCH cooler then jurassic Park T-Rex.
Also there are reconstructions of what they may have sounded like and its more of a very deep coo than a roar or growl. Idk why but a massive vicious predatory flightless bird might be scarier than how theyre usually portrayed
Today I realized statements like "T-rex...wasn't as terrifying as we imagined, but..." can have an end result that is less terrifying or more terrifying than originally envisioned, when I always thought the implication was less.
I don't really have much evidence to back up this claim, maybe it's just another rendition, but the lines on the bottom image look way too similar and reverse image search made me find the same image in this post with the same signature of the original artist. Also the one in the post looks exactly how ai draws dinosaurs.
I'm just mentioning it because if i'm right it's just theft at this point.
To clarify, while many theropod dinosaurs (like dromeosaurs) did have feathers, not all of them did, and Tyrannosaurus rex most likely did not—at least not adults.
I think there’s a weird dichotomy when it comes to dinosaurs where some people think none of them had feathers and some people think all of them did.
We know for a fact that certain dinosaurs such as ankylosaurs did not have feathers because we have well-preserved skin impressions.
While it’s true we really have no real certainty of what most living dinosaurs looked like, T. rex probably didn’t look the way it’s portrayed in the above image. Even if it was covered in feathers, it wouldn’t just look like a scaled-up chicken with seemingly giant feathers seen in this depiction.
Chickens don't even look like this when they're not selectively bred over generations to maximise their meat.
To add to your point:
When it comes to whether Tyrannosaurus rex had feathers, it's conceivable that they might have had them, since we know that feathers were a fairly common trait among other advanced theropods, as well as more basal ones, but it's just as likely they didn't have them since we've found no evidence to suggest they did.
If T. rex had feathers, they wouldn't have resembled those of modern birds, because modern bird feathers are largely either very well adapted for flight, or are derived from flight feathers. And we know that neither T. rex nor it's ancestors could fly.
I'm not a paleontologist though, I just have a background in marine evolutionary biology and I'm also a massive nerd.
Is there a chance they had sparse feathers?
They have discovered skin impressions that were a bumpy scale variety with no feathers, no really substantial sized impressions per se but what we've discovered would hint at then being featherless. They have found substantial skin impressions of carnotaurus, a distant cousin and they didn't have any so there's reason to think they had no feathers.
However if they did discover an impression that had feathers it wouldn't be terribly surprising either
If they were feathered at all, it probably would have been sparse--at least in adults--like the fur of elephants. They would have had trouble overheating if they were fully covered.
True, but I don't see why that's particularly relevant here. The hypothetical "chubby" look of the T-rex being shown here would be caused by the fluff of the feathers, which is common to many birds, including non-domesticated ones. For example, a wet owl looks super scrawny when wet, because most of the visible size is just feathers. All this image does is taking the normal body size of a T-Rex, pick a proportional feather length, and show how it'd look with them. Incidentally, it kinda looks like a chicken, which unlike many non-domesticated birds don't have as much feather fluff but actual body mass.
That said, I agree that T-rex likely didn't have feathers, and that if it did it likely would still look different due to the different nature of the feathers (although the fluff of birds' feathers also helps with insulation and to look bigger and thus scarier, so it could be possible dinosaur feathers could also have evolved to have a similar effect and eventually further evolved into flight feathers, but I'm completely speculating here).
How do we know t Rex couldn't fly? Im gonna need a source for that
Neither chickens nor the chickens undomesticated ancestor likely could fly, but feathers are a useful adaptation even without contributing to flight; insulation, controlled descent from roosting perch, lightweight armor.
They can fly lol. I raise chickens and have to cut their flight feathers every moult to stop them from using our roof as a hideout
Yeah it's like we all realised some historical dinosaurs might’ve been anatomically incorrect and took that to mean that every dinosaur looked totally different to what we used to think. Sometimes we got it pretty close the first time.
A Trex could never be that fat simply because it didn't even have the leg bones and muscular structure to support something that massive. Because, mind you, this would weigh as much as like 2 to 3 full elephants and those use all four of their legs to walk for a reason.
People always immediately jump to ultra fat chickens that were bred to have lots of meat on them and are fed corn meanwhile we had chickens like this fed wheat, grass, and chicken pellets slender chicken
Classic plump chicken beauty standards being pushed on dinosaurs
Uh, the Asil(the breed you linked as a slender chicken) are bred for fighting. That’s not what you’d consider a normal chicken either lol, if you want the most basic, ore domestication chicken specimen look up the red jungle fowl. That’s is the true ancestor to all domestic chickens.
It's an increase of volume but not a significant increase in mass.
Because muscle mass is more dense?
Do you not know about the squared cubed law?
He’s saying that the increased size in the above picture is just from lightweight feathers. The t-Rex is not literally that fat, it’s the same size as we currently conceive of t-rexs, it just has a bunch of fluffy feathers which probably don’t add that much to the total weight.
Oh ok i get you. But, to be pedantic, this image isn't just feathers.
They've made them chicken shaped. Modern chickens look like that because they're very fat and meaty, natural wild chickens and walking birds are still much thinner than this.
Also also, chickens can only be this fat because they're small, due to the squared cubed law. Elephant sized chickens would never work because while your mass increases by the third power*, your muscle power doesn't increase by the same amount. An elephant sized chicken would need to be way way stronger proportionally to work with those proportions
*: idk if that's how you'd say it in english but i mean like the volume in cubed units like with ³
I believe I've heard the adult T-Rex couldn't be covered in feathers because at their size it would make thermal regulation difficult
Yeah just like larger mammals like elephants and rhinoceroses are hairless because they are so large. T-rex lived further north but the climate was also much warmer then.
How does their size factor into that equation?
The larger an animal is the more heat it can retain and the harder it is for the animal to stay cool.
Wooly mammoths?
Lived in a time when it was very, very cold.
When things warmed up, you'll notice the bald ones are the ones that are still around.
Ice age?
Heat generation is a function of volume (since each cell generates heat) while heat loss is a function of surface area (since heat has to leave through your skin).
Scale a creature up and its volume may increase 8x while it's surface area only 4 due to the square cube law. That means it generates more heat but it's surface area used for cooling does not go up proportionally.
Do we know if the flying ones did? Because I've always assumed they didn't, as their wings have a structure more like the wings of a bat. And there's a cute irony there that one of the only ones we know didn't have feathers are the bird ones
If by "flying ones" you mean pterosaurs (which aren't dinosaurs at all), then yes, they've also been found with feathers. Though they're more likely to be for insulation as they didn't need them for flight.
Birds are flying dinosaurs, so they do have feathers. Pterosaurs aren't dinosaurs, just close relatives, and they had simpler feathers that were more like fur. Their wings were just elongated little fingers, whereas bat wings are the whole hand with the fingers throughout the membrane.
Shut up nerd, let me enjoy my KFT
It is overcorrection. No one wants to seem like the shrink wrap losers of the past, so they lean into festhers. Which is a bit boring, to be honest. No enough art leans into colourful skin, fur, patterns and most importantly: fat.
No, t-rex was a fluffy chicken. Now go ruin some other sub
right. it would look more like a bee
a giant black and yellow black and gaaaaaaaa it’s a trex I don’t know why it can hover fly gaaaaaa those are hairs like a beeee gaaaaaa
"I think there’s a weird dichotomy when it comes to dinosaurs where some people think none of them had feathers and some people think all of them did."
<---This. I had a girlfriend who somehow came to the conclusion that ALL the dinos had feathers.
And theres that guy. The guy who always just happens to be naked when the giant, feathered predatory reptile turns up.
Maybe he is into it.
I’m into it
That is in fact the joke
Vorarephilia
The dinosaurs have gone woke!!!! Thanks obana
“Down, Bessy”
That's a whole stand up skit in waiting.
Looking around for a place to recharge their tablets. ;)
It Follows
I don't wear clothes ever. I'm not putting them on for 4 ton chicken guests.
Imagine all the chicken tenders you could get off one of those!
Enough to feed an army or your mother for 10 minutes
Overestimate. It would be a starter and finished in a single, solitary bite.
Probably still lasts longer than me
thank you i really needed this
Yeah... but imagine how big they'd be!!
Dino nuggies
They didn't have hunny mussy back then though
The answer is two.
They would be huge, of course. But there would still only be two.
Tastes like T-Rex.
https://preview.redd.it/060awk0pqy7g1.jpeg?width=1169&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e255588d562f0543bef52221bd6d16df048dfdb9
WE WUZ WANGS
I laughed, damn it
Subtle racism
Supple rexism.
I like chicken Rex, he seems cuddly
Would it feel like hugging a floofy wall?
Like a floofasaur
This is pretty funny, but it's unlikely to be the case. No matter the age, predators need to be lean and quick, in order to be able to chase down prey. Combined with the fact that T Rex lived in warmer climate, it's very likely it was closer to what we imagined it than a fluffy ball.
He’s fren-shaped
I would 100% die trying to pet this giganto chicken for exactly that reason 😅
It has been found that the trex does not have feather all over the body (imprints of skin on rock fossils). Having feathers at this large of a body would for sure cause overheating
/uj The other thing that we cannot tell from the fossil record is how fat they were. We usually depict dinosaurs as these skeletal monsters, but most animals have layers of fat and other padding - imagine how much scarier dogs would look if they had no hair and their ribs showed.
So basically, dinosaurs may have looked nothing like we imagine them
This is incorrect. Older paeloart yea did do that, but it's extremely rare now. There's also the fact that skeletons can at least give a clue to where soft tissuing might be, so even if we don't know what exact soft structures some creatures mightve had, there's usually some evidence that those structures were there
https://preview.redd.it/gxb6z85hvy7g1.jpeg?width=645&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bcdcc523ae1d53df07e4b0b1a394c1f5f8d5bb88
This is untrue, paleontoligists know their stuff. They don't just put skin over bone, they look at the osteology and biomechanics of the bones to figure out where the muscles connected and how strong they were, and they model that muscled skeleton in simulations. As it turns out, something particualrly the size of a T-Rex needs to be very muscular and lean to even be able to support its weight, there's really no way you could pile any large amount of subcutaneous fat on them and have them be functioning creatures.
Large dinosaurs were also likely mesothermic gigantotherms based on a bunch of scientific evidence. Which means they were relying on simply being big enough to hold their core body temperature naturally without having to warm their blood actively like we do. They would have had visceral fat around their organs to store energy, but likely little else particularly subcutaneously as overheating would generally be a bigger concern to a large mesothermic creature.
Small dinosaurs are fair game to be fat or feathery as they'd need to keep warm, more likely much more the latter on current evidence. The big fellas not so much.
The original Jurassic Park movie is responsible for solidifying everyone’s featherless perception of dinosaurs, I’ve known people who get legit angry when you tell them that dinos most likely had feathers, because “it makes them look dumb”. Same energy as 3rd graders who believe megalodons are alive and thriving today despite us having zero evidence
This is not true, and some fossils show the whole body
https://i.natgeofe.com/n/a1991d20-2781-4b3b-b7bc-1e397850744e/01-camouflage-dinosaur-reptile.jpg
https://www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/091725_TB_fossil_main.jpg?w=1030
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/66/b5/66/66b566d81283b16f46bec6897928e12a.jpg
https://media0.faz.net/image/w1240/6520d094d4ae/w1223h550x230y69/201304/1.2142746/ichthyosauriermuttertier.webp
Didnt many scientists tried to reimagine modern day animals and a hippo looked like some eldritch being lol
No, that’s just memes. Bones show muscle attachments where significant bulk exists, it’s just the overall padding that can’t be determined
Do you know how terrifying it would be to have to run from a T-Rex sized Rooster? Bruh...
The breasts on it would be insane
Hey, get your mind out of the gutter! Not everything has boobs! Dammit!
I don't think dinos had boobs, but hey, whatever you're into
REMEMBER… WHO YOU AREEEEE
democrats are making our t-rexes tender-looking
"Them fuggin liberals. Messin ' with are good and pure dinasores"
We know pretty much for a fact that Trex didn’t have a thick feather coating, it would’ve caused overheating issues for a big animal living in a tropical environment. More likely it would’ve had a sparse feather coating kinda like hair on an elephant. Some of its close relatives like Yutyrannus and Nanuqsaurus did live in colder environments though and probably did have thicker feather coats.
Dodo and a t-rex had some fun. 😂
Danger chicken
This is something I will be rambling about when I'm a schizo grandpa. Dinosaurs are giant lizards god damnit, and the damn libral world guvnment can take them from my cold dead hands
Ok but wouldn’t this guy overheat and cook himself being that large
Aww cute
A giant murder chicken that can smell me a mile away and crush cars with its jaws, still seems pretty terrifying to me. Feathers or no.. 🤣
Look mighty delicious.
He's a BORB
I wonder if they had sweet and sour sauce?
Cute
Instead of roar it's cip cip
Tyrannosaurus Pecks.
That's a Cockatrice (Final Fantasy XII).
It would eat so many people who think it's cute. Jurassic Park would be a totally different movie.
I want one!!!
Except that we know T-Rex specifically didn't have feathers. There was an archeological find a few years back of a skin impression found with it's fossils. The skin impression didn't have any feathers. just skin.
Also, accurate T-Rex is MUCH cooler then jurassic Park T-Rex.
That doesn't look very scary. More like a 6 foot turkey
Even more terrifying
KFC has join the conversation
Also there are reconstructions of what they may have sounded like and its more of a very deep coo than a roar or growl. Idk why but a massive vicious predatory flightless bird might be scarier than how theyre usually portrayed
That meteor caused the worst shrinkflation in history
Just like a giant sparrow, then?? Surely that’s correct 😆
Tender-Rex
Cartman dinosaur
I am very angry and upset that we dont have these still running around
He needs scritches
That kinda makes it MORE terrifying!
idk have you ever interacted with chickens, they can be brutal at their current size, nevermind giant
I always refer to my birds as tiny dinosaurs, so this tracks.
What kind of birds?
The "fatbird t-rex" is literally a meme in paleontology LOL
(And no it's not scientifically accurate)
So, fat Chocobo is plausible?
Rev up those friers.
I’d imagine that some of them looked more like fat geckos or fat monitor lizards since they didn’t all have feathers
… if this had been the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, I would have laughed my ass off.
Then immediately jumped in the “we need to clone fluffy dinosaurs” train! Because we need giant, murderous, fluffy dinos in the world.
No, that’s terrifying. Chickens are the most evil creatures in all the Universe.
T Rex has lips
Please! Just leave the rex alone!!! Hasn't he suffered enough already??
Dino tenders are just a slightly larger version of dino nuggets
https://preview.redd.it/6ugutwca028g1.png?width=860&format=png&auto=webp&s=b69638fd98973ac0eb55c85de5ed49ce5884c7d0
Its still terrifying
As someone who raises chickens, I'm fully down for this interpretation.
I'm also fully down for this fully down interpretation.
Man... I'm starving. Do we have any more of those T-Rex nuggets?
RealDinosaursHaveCurves
annual dinosaur nerf dropped
so,.. more bee than chicken?
that’s horrific
fly like a trex-hornet sting like a trex-hornet?
this is no.
no this is not ok
Chonky rexth
It's still 25 feet tall, no thank you. Chickens are vicious enough on their own
COCK
You could get a lot of chicken tenders out of that
Today I realized statements like "T-rex...wasn't as terrifying as we imagined, but..." can have an end result that is less terrifying or more terrifying than originally envisioned, when I always thought the implication was less.
That image just looks like this drawing but put throught an ai tool
https://preview.redd.it/quftirarkz7g1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bb0febf8cad8c8195fad6bcbe0e587fa1ea653f6
I don't really have much evidence to back up this claim, maybe it's just another rendition, but the lines on the bottom image look way too similar and reverse image search made me find the same image in this post with the same signature of the original artist. Also the one in the post looks exactly how ai draws dinosaurs.
I'm just mentioning it because if i'm right it's just theft at this point.
Please god let this be real
Feathered dinosaurs are cringe so I refuse to believe in them
https://preview.redd.it/tx526emiwz7g1.jpeg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6440dff284b7596787d6276d5d5bbb4a342bce20
AI 🤢