Palaeontology

What color were dinosaur feathers ?

By T.K. Randall
August 29, 2015 ·  7 comments

Did dinosaurs have colorful feathers ? Image Credit: CC BY-SA 4.0 Salvatore Rabito Alcon The fact that many dinosaur species, especially small theropods, possessed a birdlike plumage of feathers is something that has only really been recognized within the last few years.

One of the major challenges surrounding this discovery has been to accurately portray what these feathered dinosaurs might have looked like. Scientists have often used the appearance of modern birds to estimate how dinosaur feathers might have been distributed and what colors they were likely to have been, but even with this data it has still proven very difficult to get a complete picture.Now however paleontologists at Brown University have come up with a method that should make it possible to determine exactly what color dinosaur feathers were by identifying the chemicals responsible for giving the feathers their color within the original fossils themselves.

To test this technique the team analyzed the fossil remains of Anchiornis huxleyi, a birdlike dinosaur, which was revealed to have possessed feathers that were at least partially black in color.

While it is still early days yet the method does appear to work and once it is rolled out to scientific establishments across the world we should soon have a much more complete picture of how these prehistoric reptiles would have looked millions of years ago.

Source: NBC News | Comments (7)

Tags: Dinosaur, Feathers, Fossil