World’s only fossils of T. rex skin suggest it was covered in scales—not feathers 
 
 Was Tyrannosaurus rex—the giant king of the tyrannosaurs—actually sporting bright plumage? Mounting fossil evidence of feathers and protofeathers on several T. rex cousins has intensified the debate. But without direct proof that T. rex had feathers, some scientists decided to hunt for clues in the next-best place: fossilized skin. They examined the world’s only known fossils of T. rex skin—from the neck, pelvis, and tail of a long-dead dino named Wyrex, stored since 2006 at the Houston Museum of Natural Science in Texas (above). They found no sign of feathers; just smooth, scaly skin. They also analyzed skin impressions from large tyrannosaurs that lived around the same time, such as Albertosaurus and Gorgosaurus. Like Wyrex, those dinosaurs were covered in scales, they report today in Biology Letters . So if these large tyrannosaurs had any feathers at all, says the team, their fluff would have been limited to their backs—the only body part for which they were lacking fossil impressions.Because their earlier cousins did have feathers, it’s likely that the large tyrannosaurs lost them somewhere along the way, the team suggests. It’s possible that the giants didn’t need feathery thermal insulation, as their bodies were better able to retain heat. ||||| Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
– Just when you were getting used to the idea of dinosaurs being covered in downy feathers, new evidence suggests that this theory may not apply to one of natural history’s most famous carnivores. Science reports that though cousins of the Tyrannosaurus rex likely sported feathers, a new study examining skin fossils of the T. rex suggests the king of beasts had scaly skin. The paper, published in the journal Biology Letters, details the findings of scientists who studied the fossilized skin of a T. rex named Wyrex, which has been stored in the Houston Museum of Natural Science since 2006. Samples from the neck, pelvis, chest, abdomen, and tail of Wyrex and other tyrannosaurid dinosaurs (Albertosaurus, Daspletosaurus, Gorgosaurus and Tarbosaurus) indicated scaly skin, not feathers. "With all the hype about feathered theropods, it's easy to forget that actually most dinosaurs had scaly, reptilian-like skin," study author Phil R. Bell tells the Washington Post. If T. rex did have feathers, the study says they’d be isolated to the dino’s back and spine, areas that were not examined since no known samples exist. Fossilized skin samples of the T. rex are rare because the methods paleontologists previously favored to get to the dinosaur’s bones involved a lot of smashing, reports the Post. The study suggests that since T. rex's earlier relatives had feathers, the dinosaur likely lost them for evolutionary reasons. "Big animals have trouble shedding excess heat," Bell says, "so being covered in feathers is not a good idea unless you live somewhere cold." (Feathered or not, dinos apparently danced.)