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Artwork by Chuang Zhao and Lida XingReconstruction of two Sinosauropteryx
sporting their orange and white striped tails, borrowed from here
Hi. It's time to color dinosaurs. Woohoo!
First off, there was an exciting discovery by a team of Chinese and British paleontologists and earth scientists reported in Nature. You can read about fossilized melanosomes, pennaceous feathers and integumentary filaments at that article, OR you can do like I did and read the Dinosaur Colors for Almost-Dummies at the NYTimes.
The upshot is that all the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and any other illustrations you've ever seen were painted out of someone's imagination. Fossils are white or gray or brown, not the color of the original obviously. So there would be no way to know what colors dinosaurs actually were.
Until now!
These scientists made connections over the last four decades that birds have microscopic sacs of pigment in their feathers called melanosomes, and that fossils of extinct birds have the same melanosomes. Paleontologists in the 1970s had started believing that birds evolved from two-legged theropods - dinosaurs. And this led to more studies and evidence of feathers on dinosaurs. And so on.
By analyzing the shape and arrangement of the fossil melanosomes, they were able to get clues to their original color. They determined, for example, that a 47-million-year-old feather had the dark iridescent sheen found on starlings today.
Isn't that crazy?
So I say, let's celebrate and color some dinosaurs! Not that I am going to be limiting myself to the iridescent sheen of starlings. I found this enchanted web site where you can pick from brachiosauruses and megaraptors and dozens of other dionsauruses and color them virtually - any colors in their palette.
See, this is mine. What can I say, I'm not too wild. But you can be as wild as you want, although it does not let you color outside the lines, drat.
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