Tell us more about dinosaur scales? 👀 Saw the misconceptions post mentioning how dino scales were super weird actually and now I'm curious what kinds of things were up with them!
so the important thing to remember here is that the evidence indicates the ancestral dinosaur was a fluffball. it seems as though, based on this evidence, that different groups of large dinosaurs evolved scaly body covering separately to deal with the problem of being bigger and thus overheated by protofeathers (or regular feathers. I don't want to get into that atm). so that means that different forms of scaly covering evolved in dinosaurs many, many times (it's unclear how many times)
so the weird thing about dinosaur "scales" (technically they're scutes, not scales, but I'll just say scales for sanity reasons) is just how not uniform they are. yes, lizard scales vary a lot, but they generally follow similar rules. dinosaur scales have no rules.
these are the scales on the back of the head of edmontosaurus, a hadrosaur. they're small, usually. they don't overlap. they are vaguely octagon shaped. sometimes there are bigger scales instead.
these are the scales of a sauropod. notice how they are way more variable in size and shape, with some having five ish sides and some having six ish sides. they still don't overlap. they don't tesselate quite as well as hadrosaur scales, and just seem to fill in as much space as possible. they're also bumpier.
here. have the sheer variety of scale designs in different Saurischians, the group that just kept evolving newly-megafaunal clades over and over again.
and they weren't all small! here are the scales (and SPIKES) of triceratops. notice their much larger size.
stegosaurs/ankylosaurs, ceratopsians, large ornithopods, sauropods, ceratosaurs, megalosaurs, allosauroids, and tyrannosaurs all evolved to be big from small fluffy ancestors independently, and they all did it in a different way. and sometimes they just messed around with that way for fun.
the diversity of dinosaur feathers is equally matched by the diversity of dinosaur scutes (scales).
(this post was compiled from many different sources)