Tyrannosaurids may have borne anything from a few feathery tufts to decadent coverings of fuzz. The dinosaur’s appearance is open to multiple hypotheses. Scales-only cannot be taken as the default any more than totally-feathery tyrannosaurids can. But given how the story of dinosaur feathers has unfolded, I’d bet on the fuzz.

Birds evolved from dinosaurs, and dinosaur fossils are often covered with impressions of feathers, which made some palaeontologists speculate whether feathers were a common trait that appeared early in their history. Now a team analysing feathers on the overall dinosaur family tree argues this is taking things too far.

Palaeontologists have known for about two decades that theropods, the dinosaur group that contained the likes of Tyrannosaurus andVelociraptor and from which modern birds evolved, were covered in feathery structures from early on in their history.

By contrast, the ornithischian lineage — which contained animals such as Triceratops, Stegosaurus and Ankylosaurus — and the huge, long-necked dinosaurs in the sauropod lineage were considered to be scaly, similar to modern reptiles.