Were they fuzzy or were they flat-skinned? That's the great question now for dinosaur researchers. After surveying all the world's known fossils of dinosaur skin, one pair of paleontologists says the vast majority of non-avian dinosaurs were scaly-skinned, Nature News reports. But this isn't the last word on the subject.

What's going on here? Why are the dinosaurs of my childhood all weird now? It helps to know the state of the science on feathered dinosaurs. This post, in The Guardian's Lost Worlds blog, and this one, in Smithsonian magazine's Dinosaur Tracking, offer great background. In short, there's plenty of evidence that the group of dinos that gave rise to modern birds—a group that includes Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor—had feathers.