“Q: did t. rex’s have feathers? i’ve been getting conflicting answers”
I hate to have to tell you this, but the reason you are getting conflicting answers is because the answer itself is unresolved. But never fear, my friend, you came to the right place! I will gladly muddy the situation further by explaining why. No, no, don’t thank me. I am here to serve.
The main problem is that so far no large, fossilized skin impressions attributed to T. rex have been discovered, which is why we can’t say for certain if they were or were not covered in scales, feathers, or some ungodly mix of both.
Photo from SAURIAN
Without direct evidence, reconstructions of T. rex are forced to rely on skin impressions and fossils from other dinosaurs, with the likelihood of similarities being based on how closely they’re related; whether or not the species is an ancestor or descendant of the tyrannosauroids; whether they are the same size, same environment, same niche… you get the idea. It’s complicated.
And we do have many skin impressions of dinosaurs that were definitively scaly. Stegosaurs, allosaurs, ankylosaurs and many other species have had soft tissue impressions found, all with scales. It is not completely unreasonable to say that T. rex could also have been entirely scaled.
Original photo from Getty Images
Of course, this is all without taking into account Dilong and Yutyrannus. Dilong was a small, basal tyrannosaur - an ancestor to T. rex - and in 2004 a fossil was discovered with preserved filamentous protofeathers.
Photo from Xu et al 2004
Then, in 2012, Yutyrannus huali was discovered, a tyrannosaur from the Early Cretaceous with definitive impressions of feathers. Also, much closer T. rex in both size and time.
Photo from Xu et al 2012
At this point, even without significant soft tissue impressions from T. rex itself, it is becoming increasingly unlikely that T. rex was entirely scaled. It is surrounded on all sides, evolutionarily speaking, with feathery species of theropods. It is still possible, of course, since the feathers of its ancestors could have secondarily lost for any number of very valid reasons, but it is just as possible, if not more so, that it would have been covered in some kind of feathery integument.
Anyway, I hope this cleared absolutely nothing up for you, as it has for me. You’re welcome.