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Bare snouts on dromaeosaurs?


Fletcher

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I was curious about the bare snouts I see on art/restorations of dromaeosaurs (and maybe other feathered non-avian theropods, but I mostly associate it with dromaeosaurs) and tried to do a bit of Googling on the topic, but I've found conflicting reports on whether or not there's strong evidence for it and not much in the way of actual specimens/papers that relate to it. I thought I'd throw the question out here, as I'm sure some of you have thoughts and/or sources on the subject! (Related: if at least some of them did have bare snouts, do we think they would have been covered in scales or bare skin?)

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We don't really know what the face covering was for most dinosaurs. On some we can infer they had scales because they had scales all over the body. Ankylosaurs, Ceratopsians and Hadrosaurs for example. We have fairly good records of scaly skin for those, though even so, not a whole lot for the faces.

Now when we start to look at some of the feathered dinosaurs like the coelurosaurian theropods we often see they are mostly covered in feathers or fuzz on the better preserved specimens. Though not a dromaeosaurid, sinosauropteryx has some fantastic fossils we can look at. When we look at this dinosaur we see a feathery outline on much of the body, but not on the snout. When we look at sinornithosaurus, which is a dromaeosaurid, we see the same pattern. A whole lot of feather covering, and there is some on the head. It even has a small mohawk on its forehead. But we see nothing on the snout. And this is exactly what we'd expect when comparing these animals with modern animals. Especially on carnivores, covering, whether it be feathers or fur, it gets in the way when eating. You don't want a mouth full of hair every time you take a bite. So snouts tend to have shorter fur on mammals. bird beaks are of course completely bare, but on scavengers like vultures we often see them with completely bare heads so they can stuff their faces into carcasses without their feathers getting in the way or getting dirty. A furry or feathery covering also needs regular cleaning, so having lots of covering in that area will also make cleaning harder.

 

So all in all, we now know that Dromaeosaurids we heavily feathered. But it's rather sensible to reconstruct these animals with a mostly bare snout with a possible scaly covering (though we don't know that they had this) since we see this all the time in modern animals and the fossil record also seems to support this type of reconstruction.

 

Sinosauropteryx

1920px-Sinosauropteryxfossil.jpg

Sinornithosaurus

Sinornithosaurus_at_the_Geological_Museum_of_China.jpg

Olof Moleman AKA Lord Trilobite

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