For the first time ever, scientists decoded the full-body colour patterns of a dinosaur after they discovered fossilized pigments. In January 2010, an analysis of melanosomes – organelles that contain pigments – in the fossilized feathers of Sinosauropteryx, a dinosaur that lived in China some 120 to 125 million years ago, revealed that the creature had reddish-brown tones and white stripes along its tail. A little later, a full-body reconstruction revealed that Anchiornis, a small, feathered-dinosaur, which lived about 150 million years ago, had black and white feathers on its body and red feathers on its head.
Even as the hundred-million-year-old bird melanosomes were being announced in 2008, the team behind the January 2010 report was using a scanning electron microscope to study minute details of feathered birds and dinosaurs found in Liaoning Province, China, a region famous for yielding thousands of exquisitely preserved animals that lived between 131 and 120 million years ago (prehistoric time line).
The Liaoning project put the team in a unique position to attempt the first melanosome discovery in dinosaurs.
Picture Credit : Google
