Science Friday: Flying Dino's Funky Plumage Revealed

No, it's not Rex, the Coelurosauravus in the youtube above, it's an Anchiornis huxleyi as you'll read about below

Fossil Feather Colors Really ARE Written In Stone

Posted on: February 5, 2010 10:10 AM, by "GrrlScientist"

Ever since dinosaurs were discovered, scientists, artists and children everywhere have speculated about what they really looked like. Fossilized bones, skin impressions and recently, feathers, provide a general mental image of these animals' appearances, but these materials also leave important questions unanswered, basic questions such as what color were dinosaurs?

Originally, it was thought that we would never know the true colors of dinosaurs, but new technologies show that assumption is in error. Scanning electron microscopy now reveals that the 155-million-year-old paravian theropod, Anchiornis huxleyi, which resembles a large woodpecker, actually sported flashy black-white-and-red coloration.

But the new field of fossil feather color had an unlikely beginning: while squinting at electron photographs of ink sacs in ancient squid, Yale University graduate student, Jakob Vinther, suddenly realized that the microscopic grains he was seeing were not bacteria, as many scientists thought. Instead, these tiny structures appeared to be melanosomes -- organelles found inside cells that contain melanin, a light-absorbing pigment that gives color to fur and feathers alike.

Because melanins are also present in modern bird feathers, it just might be possible to use them to figure out the colors and color patterns of ancient birds and feathered dinosaurs, Mr Vinther proposed.

Mr Vinther tested his hypothesis by looking at a 112 million year old fossil feather from Brazil and then used those methods to infer the colors of an extinct 47 million-year-old bird, providing an intriguing glimpse into the colors and color patterns that might have existed in dinosaurs (DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2008.0302).

That dramatic discovery inspired another team of British and Chinese scientists to examine bird-like dinosaur fossils that are covered with feather-like projections. They found that the bristles growing out of the skin of the 125-million-year-old species, Sinosauropteryx, also contained melanosomes. Based on their examinations, they concluded that the dinosaur had reddish-and-white rings along its tail as reported last week (DOI: 10.1038/nature08740).

Meanwhile, Mr Vinther continued his own work in collaboration with an international team of scientists. Together, they studied fossil feathers on the bird-like dinosaur, Anchiornis huxleyi, which was recently unearthed in Liaoning Province, China. This fossil is important in its own right because it is part of the growing body of fossil evidence confirming the once-controversial hypothesis that modern birds are descendants of theropod dinosaurs.

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