A study published on Wednesday has confirmed that the king of the dinosaurs, the Tyrannosaurus rex, did indeed have scales and not feathers. 

Recent research claimed to provide evidence for feathers in ancestors of the T-Rex and suggested the iconic carnivore may also have sported a bird-like plumage.

However, an international team of scientists tracked down samples of skin from the monster and several of its cousins in the tyrannosaurid family to confirm the T-Rex did indeed have reptilian scales, restoring its status as the world's most fearsome killer.

The skeleton of a T-Rex named Trix is installed in a room of the Naturalis Museum of Leiden, Netherlands. /AFP Photo

The team concluded that "extensive feather coverings" in tyrannosaurids – which lived much earlier – were already lost in the common forefather of T-Rex and its cousins around the beginning of the Late Cretaceous period.

The data provides "compelling evidence" of an entirely scaly covering for T-Rex, the team wrote in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

The fossils of a T-Rex at the American Museum of Natural History /VCG Photo

"Our discovery of fossilized scaly skin similar to that of modern reptiles on the bodies of a wide variety of tyrannosaur species (including T-Rex)... paints a more traditional scaly-skinned picture of these huge predators," said a press statement. 

This suggested "that most (if not all) large-bodied tyrannosaurids were scaly and, if partly feathered, these were limited to the dorsum (back)," they wrote.

The study begged the question why if T-Rex's ancestors had feathers, the giant tyrannosaurs reverted back to scales.

This fossilized skin from the neck of a T-Rex /nationalgeographic.com

Paleontologists believe the first birds appeared 150 million years ago and were descendants of small feathered dinosaurs.

The first dino feathers were simple hollow shafts, which evolved over time into something resembling their modern shape, engineered for flight.

(Source: AFP)