>>213626361
This went on for a few decades and while it was happening someone got the bright idea to join up with the dragon bone trade in china. The dragon bone trade has existed for centuries in china. It's the process of digging up fossils, grinding them into powder (typically) and using them for traditional chinese medicine. But with the DR, the chinese peasants realized they could make an entire lifetime's worth of wages if they sold the fossils to (((westerners))) instead. They almost immediately discovered that if they doctored them or just fabricated wild and crazy looking fossils instead, they could make orders of magnitude more money.

Back in the (((west))) a theory had began in the 1800s that birds might descend from dinosaurs. It had taken a back burner for a while, but with the hyping of Deinonychus (which Bob Bakker's mentor John Ostrom discovered) everyone started trying to link dinosaurs to birds even harder. It became a mentally ill obsession. Eventually this resulted in National Geographic just publishing an open hoax - Archaeoraptor. While many have heard of the Archaeoraptor hoax, what many people don't realize is that the first image of a feathered T. rex appeared in that same National Geographic issue. An obvious government psyop, because it was pushed HARD even when people tried to stop the issue from being published. Orders obviously came from above to force it. Later everyone backpedalled and "well actually'd" that there WAS a new species in there - this would become known as Microraptor. Problem is, Microraptor is obviously fake and based on the old Tetrapteryx thought experiment. This opened the floodgates and fake chinese fossils (nearly all of them bedecked in feathers) started FLOODING into the (((west))).

>>5009041
Actualy the idea that T. rex had feathers was always made up propaganda. True fact: the first known depiction of a feathered Tyrannosaur is from the same issue of National Geographic that published the archaeoraptor hoax.