A previous artist's wild guess at the colors of Anchiornis huxleyi. In a (to me) earth-shattering development, scientists now have a real idea of its colors -- go to the first article linked to below for the new image.
Something happened this week and last that I never thought I’d see in my lifetime — or ever. Scientists discovered the colors of some dinosaurs.
After the first article I saw, I figured it was a one-time fluke. Then this week, I saw this article about Anchiornis huxleyi close on the heels of this article last week about the tail strip colors of Sinosauropteryx, and I knew it was the real deal. For feathered dinosaurs at least, we now have a time machine. As I commented on the New York Times, the moment of realization brought a tear to my eye. I took a course on dinosaurs in college. I vividly remember our professor stating how color was just something there was no way of knowing and would always be up to our imagination. That was just 10 years ago.
How did they do this? In modern birds, feathers have pigment sac shape and arrangements that hold constant for various colors of modern birds. Since most (but not all) scientists believe birds descend from one group of dinosaurs, they looked at feather-like bristles on the fossils of bird-like ancestors. Sure enough, the familiar melanosomes were there and interpretable. Of course, melansome arrangement, pigment, and shape may have changed slightly over 100 million years, but my gut feeling is that they wouldn’t change too much given the laws of physics presumably haven’t either. Sharks still look like they did 150 million years ago, so things don’t necessarily have to change.
Of course, the color of dinosaurs with scales continues to elude us. But who knows? 10 years after deciding to go to the moon, we walked there. We put our mind to eradicating smallpox and now that virus exists only as a few samples frozen in little plastic tubes in U.S. and Russian labs. Scientists discovered the scaly mummified remains of a duck-billed dinosaur in Montana in 2002. With enough determination and good science, there may well be a way.
