Regardless of whether this specific dinosaur is thought to have feathers or not, I was wondering if feathers would survive the fossilization in the first place? Is there anything intrinsic to feathers that would make them different in that regard, then, say, the skin (which apparently is relatively well preserved)?

Feathers have in fact "survived" fossilization, notably, those attached to several whole-body archaeopteryx fossils (scare quotes around "survive" because the original material is gone, it is only the shape which survives)

Under very special preservation circumstances, feathers to fossilize. You can see some examples of dinosaur fossils in this Wikipedia article. If you search you can also find lots of bird feature fossils (avian dinosaurs).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feathered_dinosaur

this article is from The NY Times and I am only linking to it because the first photo in that article is an amazing fossil of a feather. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/science/dinosaur-feather-...

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> enough time for almost all mammals and modern birds and darn near everything you can see today except crocodiles and horseshoe crabs to evolve.

I know what you're trying to say, but every living thing today, from the mammals to the fungus among us, have spent the same amount of time evolving, dating back to the first life, or at least the first life encoded for reproduction. Except for the birds, the dinosaurs quit early.

Whales evolved from small land mammals since about 50 million years (half the time since dinosaurs) (it took them more like 20 million, but I'm being generous because whales still exist).

100 million years is an extremely long time. A lot happens in that amount of time.

> 100 million years is an extremely long time. A lot happens in that amount of time.

during that period of time, the ancestors of every living thing on earth was also mutating and naturally selecting.

during the entire time the dinosaurs roamed the earth, the mammals and/or their ancestors were also evolving and saving up genetic endowment for being the fittest in every eventuality; sadly, the dinosaurs bet on the wrong ... horses.

The big famous ones got toasted, but one[1] of the small specie survived. A few decades ago, we realized that birds are the descendant of dinosaurs. (Or "birds are dinosaurs" if you prefer that classification.)

[1] One specie or a few species? I'm really curious about the current most popular hypothesis.

Technically yes, but in practice I think the victims and survivors of extinction events might beg to differ

Considering natural selection is rarely wasteful at the species level, must've been some nasty predators to evolve that much armor.