Dinosaur Colors Revealed in Full

Scientists have reconstructed the likely coloring of the dinosaur Anchiornis huxleyi, using magnified images of fossil feathers. Credit: NatGeo

Scientists have reconstructed the likely coloring of the dinosaur Anchiornis huxleyi, using magnified images of fossil feathers. Researchers are billing it as the first "full-body color patterns of a dinosaur."

This two-legged dinosaur from the Late Jurassic period (between roughly 160 and 150 million years ago) appears to have had a dark grey or black body and wings with long white feathers, fringed in black, according to a summary of the research published in the journal Science Friday. Its head probably had rusty speckles and sported a long, rusty brown crest.

(All this might sound familiar to a separate recent announcement of the first scientifically verified dinosaur color scheme. But that work, published in Nature, had found pigments only on a few isolated parts of dinosaurs.)

"This was no crow or sparrow, but a creature with a very notable plumage," said Richard O. Prum, chair and the William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale and a co-author of the study. "This would be a very striking animal if it was alive today."

Quanguo Li and colleagues analyzed scanning electron microscope images of the partial skeleton of an Anchiornis huxleyi specimen that was discovered recently in China. The images revealed a variety of organelles called melanosomes, which contain the pigment melanin. (Other molecular pigments like carotenoids also produce plumage colors but evidence of these pigments has not been found in fossil feathers.)