Return_of_the_STAR wrote:The thing is did the ones listed as having feathers always have feathers? Did they evolve to have feathers. Did some have more than others. These creatures were around for millions of years yet we've only found a few skeletal examples of each. a human from ten thousand years ago was covered head to toe in body hair. Apart from the Greeks very few of us are now. Look at the difference between a woolly mammoth and an elephant. If we only looked at the skeletons of each we wouldnt know that one was covered in hair and the other not. It's only because of frozen preserved mammoths that we know they were hairy.
Sure. There's always going to be a lot of uncertainty and the fossil record is definitely not exhaustive. While we do know that all of those species had approximately that body type, you're definitely right to say that it'll take a long time (and a lot more fossils!) to build up a better picture of what each individual species actually looked like when alive, and whether genetically similar species may have had large variations in hair or feathers (like apes and man do).
I should say (I hope you don't mind) that I think you're a little confused about time scales; a human from 10,000 years ago would be identical to a human today. Anatomically modern humans (
Homo sapiens sapiens) evolved roughly 200,000 years ago. Our 'parent' species,
Homo erectus, is the 'caveman' you're probably thinking of and evolved perhaps 1.8 million years ago (they invented fire 800,000 years ago, which is pretty neat). They looked pretty similar to us. It was the pre-
Homo genus, the
Australopithecus, that still looked a bit like apes, and they evolved roughly 4 million years ago.
(Sorry for off-topic science chat in this thread, movie guys. I hope no-one minds!)