I don't want to be a bother, but do you mind if you can do a post about my favorite tyrannosaur, Yutyrannus?
Yutyrannus lived in China during the Early Cretaceous period, approximately 125 million years ago - although it was discovered fairly recently, being officially described only in 2012. As it’s so recent, little is known about the animal, but one fairly interesting thing is certain...
At 30 feet in length, Yutyrannus was the largest definitively feathered dinosaur. All three known specimens possess long, filamentous feathers growing on multiple locations on the body, including the neck, arms, pelvis, foot, and tail. This leads me to believe that Yutyrannus was feathered over the entirety of its body.
The region of northeastern China that Yutyrannus inhabited was very cold during the Early Cretaceous, and Yutyrannus may have been feathered in order to keep itself warm in the snow.
While initially classified as a tyrannosaur, Yutyrannus was later found to belong to Proceratosauridae. The proceratosaurids are closely related to the tyrannosaurids, but are more physiologically primitive, and are believed to have diverged from the ancestors of true tyrannosaurids during the Jurassic period. Yutyrannus was initially mistaken for a tyrannosaurid due in part to its great size; most proceratosaurids are around one-third its size. The only known exception is Sinotyrannus, a contemporary of Yutyrannus’s.
