Cuddlysaurus: where fluffy IS deadly

Cuddly-looking, fluffy and fuzzy: not something you'd expect to describe a very large carnivorous mesozoic predator. BUT, there WAS a downy dinosaur. Yutyrannus huali, the tyrannosaurid with the fluffy coat, is the largest dinosaur discovered with a full covering of feathers.

Y. huali was uncovered in China, and estimated to be 60 million years older that its famous cousin, Tyrannosaurus rex. Although considerably feathered, the immense bulk of the predator would not have been very aerodynamic - instead the down was purely for insulation, perhaps with a little splash of colour for display. It's not entirely odd for a predator to be feathered - snowy owls manage quite well in polar climates and their physiology is simply a downsized version of Yutyrannus.

(Image of Yutyrannus huali by Alain Beneteau aka dustdevil)

Info collected from these news articles here, here and here.
And this journal article in Nature.

Eagles like pork chops too

April 2011: A Wedgetail eagle in Kalbarri gorge, WA. Rounded a bend towards the Murchison River near Little Red Hill and Big Red Hill (damn Australia, we're bloody imaginative). Saw the eagle on the ground and we were pretty excited to see that it had caught something barely minutes before we arrived. This caused a HUGE debate in the car as to what it had caught - the majority said "rabbit"... I claimed "pig".

The car spooked the wedgie, so she tried to drag her prize away into the bushes. We were curious but were also interested in checking the state of the river for future fishing expeditions a few metres away. We hopped out the car and the wedgie decided that we were after her and dropped her kill in the bushes nearby. I wondered over carefully, and used a stick to examine the carcass (didn't want to leave gross human smells on eagle food :P) since the wedgie was still hanging around to grab her meal back the moment we left.

Guess who was right?!?!

Pork chops of Razor-back piglet!!
(headless)

Feathery upset

I had this journal article in Nature brought to my attention; and low and behold! It has my favourite palaeoartist, Raul Martin's interpretation of this amazing predator, Concavenator corcovatus...

Interesting features of this 130 million year old predatory dinosaur:
(1) a strange hump on its back; and
(2) unusual calcareous lumps on its forearms (believed to bear quills - a possible evidence of feathers).

The eleventh and twelfth vertebrae are more prominent, being double the height of the rest of the vertebrae. This pyramidal crest may have been used in territorial disputes and/or attracting a mate, or even similarly used in a manner resembling Stegosaurus' plates. (To me, it looks like an ideal, gentle slope where a male Concavenator could rest his chest while romancing the lady... but that's my outlandish observation).
At this point, all we can gather is Concavenator is a rather strange specimen.

Now the bumps on the forearms is even more controversial than the odd triangular hump. So the problem here is this... C. corcovatus provides evidence that feathers began to appear earlier than previously thought. Which now puts a little twist in the Therapod family tree, as Concavenator is more closely related to "Big Al" (MOR 693) which, up until now, have never had a feathery relative. The sister lineage which has the feather-featuring dinosaurs (T. rex) and finally leading to modern-day birds has now been thrown into shambles over the rights to bear plumage.