AND THEY CARRIED WALKIE-TALKIES TOO

Possible discovery made about the T-Rex:

Tyrannosaurus rex may have had a coat of fluffy feathers.
This conclusion comes from US and Chinese scientists who today announce the discovery of a 130m-year-old forerunner of the lumbering Cretaceous predator.

Dilong paradoxus - its generic name comes from the Mandarin for emperor and dragon, and its species name from its unusual features - was the size of a turkey, had a single nose bone, a massive jaw, a long neck, and hands with three fingers.

Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History, Xing Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and other colleagues report in Nature that its fossils were unearthed in Liaoning province in China.

Dilong is the most primitive of the tyrannosaurid family found so far. But what shook the discoverers was that the region's unique volcanic ash and sandy muds preserved not just the skeleton but also some soft tissue - and the first direct evidence that tyrannosaurs had feathers, or at least branching structures an inch long called protofeathers.

So Spielberg's gonna go back and fix it, right? Right? Well, let's think about this for a second.

Consider human evolution. The ancestors of humans, such as australopithecus, homo habilis, etc, were significantly hairier than today's humans. And they go back a few million years. So in that period of time -- a short period in evolutionary terms -- 2-legged upright primates went from very hairy to almost hairless in some cases. (not me, though, hehe)

Now consider the recent finding. The remains of the Dilong paradoxus mentioned go back 130 million years. That leaves 65 million years worth of evolution before the large-scale extinction period for the dinosaurs. From an evolutionary standpoint, that is a much more significant amount of time than the de-furrification time of 2-legged primates. And since the T-Rex grew to be rather large -- in excess of 40 feet long, nose to tail -- it wouldn't exactly be predisposed towards flying, regardless of whether you're in the "agile hunter" camp or the "plodding scavenger" camp. Thus, I'm not yet sold on the idea of a giant feathered tyrannosaur.

(I was quite the dino-nut in my pre-pubescent years, and the residuals remain)