Finding out What Colors Dinosaurs Were
By using an electron microscope to examine nanoscale structures in a 40 million-year-old bird feather, researchers have determined that, in life, the birds were black with an iridescent, bluish-green coppery sheen, like starlings and grackles. The key to figuring this out was the discovery by researchers at Yale University that rod-shaped nanostructures in the feather specimens aren’t bacteria, but remnants of pigment-containing cells called melanosomes.

iridescent. Credit: Jakob Vinther/Yale University
Iridescence in bird feathers is caused by constructive interference of light scattered by the cells; how the light scatters is determined by the arrangement of the melanosomes, which are preserved not only in the bird fossils but in some dinosaur and mammalian ones as well. The Yale researchers hope this technique could be used to get a better picture of the coloring and patterning of dinosaurs and other extinct creatures. This work is described online in the journal Biology Letters.
Keep Reading
Most Popular

The dark secret behind those cute AI-generated animal images
Google Brain has revealed its own image-making AI, called Imagen. But don't expect to see anything that isn't wholesome.

The hype around DeepMind’s new AI model misses what’s actually cool about it
Some worry that the chatter about these tools is doing the whole field a disservice.

The walls are closing in on Clearview AI
The controversial face recognition company was just fined $10 million for scraping UK faces from the web. That might not be the end of it.

This horse-riding astronaut is a milestone in AI’s journey to make sense of the world
OpenAI’s latest picture-making AI is amazing—but raises questions about what we mean by intelligence.
Stay connected

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.