Pictures: Dinosaur True Colors Revealed by Feather Find

Sinosauropteryx, a turkey-size carnivorous dinosaur, is the first dinosaur—excluding birds, which many paleontologists consider to be dinosaurs—to have its color scientifically established.

In 1996, Sinosauropteryx was also the first dinosaur reported to have feathers. It was found in the Yixian formation, 130- to 123-million-year-old sediments in Liaoning Province in northeast China, which have since produced thousands of apparently feathery fossils.

In a report released online today by the journal Nature, an international team of paleontologists and experts in scanning electron micrography infer that this dinosaur had reddish orange feathers running along its back and a striped tail. (Read the full story: "True Dinosaur Colors Revealed for the First Time.")

Why would a dinosaur need a striped tail? Many birds, the living descendants of non-avian dinosaurs, use brightly colored tails for courtship displays.


news.nationalgeographic.com...

Wow!
Amazing!

MODS, i'm not sure at all if i'm posting in the right section, if not please feel free to move.

Check out the pictures in the link, fairly interesting!

Very cool! I love hearing great new facts about dinosaurs. I wonder what's coming next...

Very cool find! The striped tail could also have been for camouflage maybe. Hopefully, this will lead to finding out the colors of more dinosaurs.

It's a good story. If they had colours, it implies a mating or display behaviour. At the least, some natural selection at work in terms of camouflage...if their habitat tended towards orange.

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/f7dc81406ae8.jpg[/atsimg]

Dinosaur had ginger feathers

[edit on 27-1-2010 by Kandinsky]

WOW! A REAL LIFE DINOSAUR FEATHER WITH COLOR AND ALL!

man that so cool!

thanks for this.

SF

Amazing find! I had no idea feather colors would be able to be discovered this long after the creature died!

There's a lot of speculation about what dinosaurs looked like, it's nice to have some facts.

reply to post by Kandinsky


Not necessarily orange. If their prey (or predators) were colour blind then orange would look very similar to green.

Hmmm at least the people with ginger hair can claim that their ginger gene is probably older than the rest of us.....

Originally posted by davesidious
reply to post by Kandinsky

 

Not necessarily orange. If their prey (or predators) were colour blind then orange would look very similar to green.

Yes it would. However, the orange pigmentation gene will have been selected as having some advantage to the species. I don't know if you've read about the Peppered Moth? It's a moth that has changed colour due to the effects of industry and natural selection. If these feathered dinos had orange striped feathers...it's almost a certainty that it was to gain an advantage in the same way as the moth...

The evolution of the peppered moth over the last two hundred years has been studied in detail. Originally, the vast majority of peppered moths had light colouration, which effectively camouflaged them against the light-coloured trees and lichens which they rested upon. However, because of widespread pollution during the Industrial Revolution in England, many of the lichens died out, and the trees that peppered moths rested on became blackened by soot, causing most of the light-coloured moths, or typica, to die off from predation. At the same time, the dark-coloured, or melanic, moths, carbonaria, flourished because of their ability to hide on the darkened trees

link

reply to post by Kandinsky


I did know about those already - it's a great observation.

My point is that the colour of a species doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough. Orange would most definitely be good enough camouflage against animals with non-perfect colour vision. Colour blind, or even black and white vision, would render orange practically the same as green.

Before technicolor and kodak color pictures, we tend to think of anything further back than the 1950's as everything being black and white.

Or gray in the case of dinosaurs. I've always assumed dinosaurs have been misrepresented in their color, skin texture, feathers or some kind of hair.

Thanks OP for pointing this out.

Related (ish ) article released today.

Dinosaur Had Vibrant Colors, Microscopic Fossil Clues Reveal

Unlike recently published work from China that inferred the existence of two types of melanin pigments in various species of feathered dinosaurs, the Science study analyzed color-imparting structures called melanosomes from an entire fossil of a single animal, a feat which enabled researchers to reveal rich color patterns of the entire animal.

[edit on 5-2-2010 by nophun]

[edit on 5-2-2010 by nophun]