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Feathered ornithomimosaurs! At last!A new Jehol find? Nope! It's Ornithomimus itself! Two new specimens (an adult and a juvenile) have been found with feather traces, and a long-known adult specimen has been discovered to have what may be attachment points for large feathers on the arms. This means that pennibrachiae go down to the base of maniraptoriforms! The juvenile, however, doesn't preserve pennibrachiae, so it might mean that in these basal maniraptoriforms only the adults had pennibrachiae, and that pennibrachiae originally evolved for display. In addition, this also opens up the possibility of finding feathered dinosaur specimens in coarser-grained sediment than usually expected, as long as fossil hunters keep a sharp eye out for those delicate feather traces.

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The Infectious Saliva Mythby ~Albertonykus

Traditional Art / Drawings / Animals

Before I started participating in online discussions, I had no clue how rampant this idea was. This idea is the claim that Tyrannosaurus rex had "infectious saliva" as some sort of "secret weapon" that would allow it to incapacitate any opponent. (Not surprisingly, this is something that usually turns up in dinosaur fight topics.) For a while, someone even made an entire article called "Infectious Saliva in Tyrannosaurus" on Wikipedia. (It has since been degraded into a single paragraph on the main Tyrannosaurus article.)

The reality is that any kind of saliva potentially contains dangerous bacteria, and there's no evidence that Tyrannosaurus rex had bacteria that were significantly more deadly than that of any other animal. So we can forget about infectious saliva being some magical secret weapon exclusive to Tyrannosaurus rex.

In fact, we can probably forget about it being a reliable weapon of any sort. Infections take a long time to kill anything, and it'd be so much easier for a tyrannosaurid to just finish off whatever it wants to finish off by biting it with those powerful jaws. I suspect it might be easier to fight off infection through a strong immune system than survive a bite taken out of your neck and a crushed spine as well. Not to mention that saliva isn't exactly a good habitat for bacteria, with its antibacterial compounds. Unreliable, unsuccessful, and unwieldy. It's no wonder that, even though anything can potentially house dangerous bacteria in its mouth, there's no animal that actually uses infection to kill. (It was once thought that Varanus komodoensis did, and the similarities between its teeth and those of Tyrannosaurus rex were what inspired the idea that Tyrannosaurus rex might have had this adaptation. However, it's since been found that dangerous bacteria found in the saliva of Varanus komodoensis are really residue from the carrion that it eats, and that Varanus komodoensis actually has venom that it may use for hunting. In any case, shock and blood loss are now thought to be far more important than infection, leaving the sole basis of the infectious Tyrannosaurus saliva hypothesis null.)

~DarthGojira Jun 22, 2012

Yeah, it's the equivalent of saying that bazookas need bayonets.

~SpongeBobFossilPants Mar 25, 2012

It gets worse: one Wikipedia user suggested on their user page that infectious tyrannosauroids were more likely than infectious megalosauroids or carnosaurs!

~mattyutehev12483 Oct 12, 2011 Hobbyist General Artist

of course there were Tyrannosaurs who had Infectious Saliva! they just died out early due to being too Incompetent to remember that they have the Strongest Jaws in Earth's History

~Albertonykus Oct 12, 2011

Haha! We don't know whether there were any though, of course.

~ericcartman2546 Mar 6, 2011

you probably wouldn't even notice if you were bitten

~Albertonykus Mar 6, 2011

Possibly!

~TyrannosaurusPrime Mar 4, 2011

Nice bashing on the "poisonous saliva hypothesis, indeed there are remains of a Triceratops and an Edmontosaurus annectens that were bitten by a T. rex and they survived long enough for their wounds to heal, and they didn't die of infection

~Albertonykus Mar 4, 2011

Also a good point.

~TyrannosaurusPrime Mar 4, 2011

Thanks.

~commander-salamander Mar 4, 2011 Hobbyist General Artist

I had no idea that people thought such things. They can get some very silly ideas.

I would have thought that a single bite could be quite devastating to a prey animal just in itself from blood loss. It doesn't take much.

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