Trex to color12/31/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Wearing bright colors can help attract mates or keep predators away.Ĭolor can also help animals blend into their environments. Diurnal animals, including reptiles and birds, use color to “talk” to one another. Dinosaurs lived during the day, which made them diurnal animals. Other clues may come from what we know about a dinosaur’s daily life. It had tiny feathers they called “dino fuzz,” too. Researchers who studied the patterns of these melanosomes in Sinosauropteryx found that the predator likely had a reddish-brown and striped tail. The different shapes of the melanosomes can sometimes tell us different things about a species’ coloring. Melanosomes can be found in animal cells and they absorb light in different ways that make the colors we see. These tiny structures are called melanosomes. Scientists can actually look at tiny little elements in fossils to learn about animal fur, feathers, and skin. “There are absolutely beautiful specimens coming out of China,” Webster said.Īnother dinosaur found in China that we’ve learned about in recent years was a small predator called Sinosauropteryx. The dinosaur was probably about the size of a chicken. Webster told me about a field trip he took a few years ago to China, where a woman found a small dinosaur fossil with what looked like feathers. They think dinosaurs may have evolved into some of my most favorite animals: birds. Other scientists are gathering evidence that leads them to believe dinosaurs might have had some kind of feathers. Since we can’t observe dinosaurs, some scientists look to the colors of their cold-blooded cousins in the reptile family, including snakes, turtles, and lizards. Called crinoids, they live in the ocean today and also lived in dinosaur times. He’s a paleontologist fascinated with the fossils of colorful sea creatures that have tentacle arms. That’s what I learned from my friend Gary Webster at Washington State University. We’ve only found traces of dinosaur skin a couple of times. In fact, most of the dinosaur fossils we’ve found are of teeth and bones. This includes the color of Tyrannosaurus rex. When we dig up fossils from the Earth they can tell us a lot about life in the past.įossils are preserved traces of plants and animals. Unfortunately, one thing that fossils don’t tell us a whole lot about is dinosaur color. ![]()
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