"Scientists have found evidence of some of the original coloration of a dinosaur that lived about 125 million years ago, showing that it had rings of orange-brown bristly feathers around its tail."
Color has long been something that scientist thought would never be known about the dinosaurs. Since only hard tissues tend to be preserved in fossil records there was little hope in the scientific community that any of the colorful softer tissues would ever be studied. And without those how could we ever know what color palette any of these incredible creatures displayed. The answer came in a feather.
Recently discovered feathered dinosaurs held the key to our first look at color. Feathers, unlike soft tissue, are made of tough proteins and hold up much better. Unfortunately these fossilized feathers don't preserve the color they once had but rather look much like any other fossil.
Sinosauropteryx From wiki. See other artist renditions based on these findings here.
"When you look at the feathers, you don't know what the colors were. The feathers are a mixture of brownish colors," says Benton (paleontologist Mike Benton at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom). "They're just preserved either as sort of dirty, whitish, beige kind of color and a kind of darker, equally dirty kind of brownish color. "
But that didn't stop Benton and his team from looking farther. They knew that some color in birds comes from tiny structures contained in capsules within the feather, known as melanins. You can tell what color the feather is by looking at the shape of these capsules.
"The black or dark brown kind of melanin goes into a somewhat sausage-shaped capsule," says Benton, while a reddish-brown kind of melanin goes into a more rounded capsule shaped like a ball.
So, they looked inside the feathers of a Sinosauropteryx, a turkey sized carnivore that lived early in the Cretaceous period, which had a tail ringed with dark band of primitive feather. In these feathers they found the capsule shape associated with red-brown.
"These dark stripes, as far as we can tell, were exclusively ginger, and so this early dinosaur with its long thin tail had ginger and white stripes up the tail."
Benton's team reported all of these findings in the journal Nature.
Classic Dinosaur Colors
While these colorful developments of the lost world of dinosaurs is quite exciting, it will still be left up to our imaginations to create the colors of popular dinosaurs, like Tyrannosaurus rex, with no feathers and seemingly no other way to figure out their true color, at least for now.
Here are some classic dinosaur illustrations by different artists. Found at search4dinosaurs.com.
Dinosaur Colors from the COLOURlovers Library
Adapted from material found on NPR.
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