cubern replied to your post “Side note on the topic of animal integument: one thing that really...”
I distinctly remember posting pictures of slender-billed vultures in a dinosaur discord one time, and people were really concerned and seemed disgusted with them.
The really fun thing is that *some* fans of feathered dinosaurs CLEARLY just prefer the aesthetics of dinosaurs being big weird birds to dinosaurs being big weird lizards, and all the huffing and puffing about “scientific accuracy” was, in their particular case, just a way to dress up their personal preference as being more “correct” than someone else’s.
And I know this because we now know that, despite having some distant relatives who had feathers, T.rex was scaly, but some people STILL draw it with feathers because they like that look better.
Or, more succinctly: some dinosaur fans put feathers on dinosaurs who didn’t have them because they like feathered dinosaurs better regardless of scientific fact.
Your poor vultures clearly weren’t reconstructed right. The photographers should have given them feathers EVERYWHERE.
