A new study of the four-winged dinosaur Microraptor reveals new insights about the arrangement and coloration of its feathers.
(Video Link) According to Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History and his Chinese colleagues, it had an iridescent dark coloration, much like a crow.
More discussion at Dinosaur Tracking
Thanks, Jennifer Miller
Saturday, March 10, 2012
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3 comments:
Fantastic. I love this information and the perfect merging of art and science on your site. Yours is the best blog on the web. Thank you so much for doing this.
That is pretty amazing. And it's really cool how these look like birds... but then you look closer and see they don't really do that at all. :P
I was reading something earlier about dark pigmentation in Archaeopteryx and all I could think was "wow, so much for those brightly-colored Archaeopteryx toys I had when I was a kid".
Ah well. It's better to know the truth than to keep guessing, and at any rate maybe there are species whose fossils haven't been discovered yet who were colored like peacocks or quetzals or Mandarin ducks.
And in the meantime I can continue to play pretend in my sketchbook.
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