At the end of the article it says:.
". . .Godefroit suggests that the largest dinosaurs likely had the fewest feathers, as they wouldn't have needed them for insulation. 'Just like elephants in Africa don't need fur,' he says.' "
Will be interesting to see how these ideas play out as we get more information. Feathers don't necessarily act only as insulation - they could function as a cooling mechanism. They provide shade for the skin and have some potential to keep air circulating around under them when they are flexed. We don't know the details of dinosaur metabolism, but for the larger ones, getting rid of excess heat could have been a problem because their body mass was relatively large compared to the surface area of their skin and many of them lived in climates hotter than today's.
---In geology2@yahoogroups.com, <linkerns@...> wrote :
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