What color were the dinosaurs?

The nonavian dinosaurs have undergone a dramatic transformation in the past few decades. We used to think that animals with gray and brown scales had no feathers at all.

What colors were the dinosaurs? How do we know?

The answers to both questions were given by an associate professor in macroevolution at the University of Bristol. Since the first dinosaur feathers were reported in 1996, scientists have noticed round structures within them that many had assumed were fossils.

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As a student studying a completely different animal, Vinther realized that these structures might be something more.

Vinther told Live Science that it was remarkably well preserved.

You can take ink from a squid you bought at the fishmonger and put it under an electron microscope, and it will look exactly the same.

The balls are melanosomes, tiny blobs of melanin, the color that colors hair, skin, feathers and eyes. These structures were mistaken forbacteria in dinosaur feathers.

Scientists had largely believed that the fossilization process wouldn't be able to survive, but discoveries by scientists such as Vinther have shown that it can. It is because of the different shapes of the balls that they produce different colors.

If you look at a person with black hair or a bird with black feathers, those melanosomes are sausage-shaped.

You just look for sausages and meatballs, and then you can put colors on extinct animals.

The fat melanosomes show gray or blue. Melanosomes that are long, skinny, flat or hollow are indicative of iridescence.

The structures that can interact with light are created by ordering melanin in a specific way inside the feather. The hollow shape of the individual melanosomes helps them fit together in a way that creates a metallic sheen.

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There are 4 images, the first one is image 1 and the 2nd one is image 3.

You can learn a lot if you know the shape of the melanosomes in a fossil. Some dinosaurs were showy.

Many of the close relatives of Velociraptor were chasing the kids around in the kitchen in the movie. It was not like the naked thing we see there. Most of the relatives that we looked at were iridescent. They would have had a metallic sheen.

Dinosaurs had camouflage. Anchiornis was the first dinosaur that Vinther studied. It had a gray body, white wing feathers, and a red crown, according to the melanosomes.

The first dinosaur to be discovered with feathers was called Sinosauropteryx, and it had a striped tail and bandit mask. Countershading is a kind of natural camouflage in which the parts of an animal that are in shadow have a lighter color than the parts that are in sunlight. The white-tailed deer has a white belly and brown backside.

If the countershading is high on the body, as it was in Sinosauropteryx, the animal probably lives out in the open. Countershading that is gradual and low on the body suggests a forest environment where the light is diffuse.

Camouflage distinguishes between predator and prey. The huge armored dinosaur seems like it would have had no enemies.

Elephants and rhinos have no color patterns, like large animals today.

It was countershaded that the animal covered in armor would have been frightening.

It was originally published on Live Science.