dinosaur discourse
I am going to spoil the joke under the cut, but in service of giving some additional context that makes it even funnier:
If you're having trouble telling what the difference is between the two dinos, the joke is that there is virtually no difference, save for a feature we have no actual physical evidence for (unless there's been a big update I missed, we don't have any conclusive evidence of what large therapods were colored like).
This does not stop every paleoart subreddit or twitter/bsky artist following from being full of the most utterly miserable bickering pedants having wildly disproportionate reactions to minor and purely theoretical... I can't even call them arguments. Just different ideas.
Meanwhile, the paleoartists I know from my master's program- the people who are doing the illustrations for real museums like the smithsonian and university teaching materials- are out there having fun and going "How much can I make this Tyrannosaur look like a flamingo? It's not like there's anything to suggest they were NOT bright pink :)"
Hey Gallus, as an Actual paleoartist, what do you think of this?
So my master's is in Botanical Illustration, not Paleontological Illustration, but I did Email this to my profs that would make redditors explode and they offered the following notes:
Overall: The vibes are immaculate, but Probably Not
We have some fossil evidence to suggest juvenile Rexes were downy, but adults were almost certainly not
Especially not like this, because sparrows are floofy because they're little animals that live in temperate climates with cold winters, and T-Rex was a Very Large Animal living in tropical climates. It did not need the insulation.
That's a pose a T-rex could strike but not it's natural habit. The artist has also fudged the proportions a bit, in a very plausible way so always double-check your measurements and reference sources to make sure you're not making stuff up
T-rex would have had no need for flight feathers like depicted on the wings and tail, and it comes from earlier in the evolutionary tree than flighted dinosaurs so it wouldn't have them vestigially either
HOWEVER:
It's extremely valid and compelling to consider how feathering might have radically changed the silhouettes, especially in terms of camouflage and insulation for some of the smaller and midsize dinosaurs
Patterning and cryptic camouflage are also very valid interpretations, even on a giant non-aquatic predator, because a ton of animals are paler on the underside
The little bright cheek puffs are something that might have shown up as skin pigmentation, esp given that Rexes had extremely good vision and probably fairly sociable so communicative coloration would be a very valid and reasonable choice
They think its very cute and funny and they're all emailing this image to each other and printing it to put it on office doors
