Posted on 04/25/2022 12:04:12 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Once you know the shape of the melanosomes in a fossil, you can learn all sorts of things about the animal. For example, some dinosaurs with fearsome reputations were incredibly showy.
"Many of the close relatives of Velociraptor — you know, that was chasing the kids around in the kitchen [in "Jurassic Park"]?" Vinther said. "First of all, that was covered in feathers. It was really bird-like, not like this naked thing that we see there. But furthermore, most of the relatives that we looked at that were close to it, they were iridescent. So they would have had a metallic sheen, like hummingbirds or peacocks."
Other dinosaurs had complex camouflage. The first dinosaur Vinther ever studied was a small, bird-like animal called Anchiornis. Based on the melanosomes, Vinther and his team concluded that it had a gray body, white wing feathers with black splotches at the tips and a red crown like a woodpecker's.
Another dinosaur called Sinosauropteryx — the first dinosaur to be discovered with feathers — had a striped tail and a bandit mask, sort of like a raccoon. It also had countershading, a kind of natural camouflage in which the parts of an animal that would usually be in shadow have a lighter pigment than the parts that would usually be in sunlight. A classic example of this is the white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), which has a white belly and a brown backside.
This coloring tells scientists about the creatures' habitat; if the countershading is sharp and high on the body, as it was in Sinosauropteryx, the animal probably lives out in the open. Countershading that's more gradual and low on the body suggests a forest environment where the light is more diffuse.
Camouflage also distinguishes predators from prey.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
ping
Racists!.................
Always with the race card. #bdm=black dinosaurs matter..
Many state that dinosaurs were more closely related to birds than reptiles. Maybe there were both and something completely unrelated. I think we need to get some DNA and make a Jurassic Park...
Yeah sure.... Covered in feathers.
I’ll field that one, as I saw a documentary about dinosaurs that years ago. They were yellow, purple, and green.
Much like new “skins” in video games. Gotta believe it couldn't be too hard to do.
Purple. Duh!
depends on what neighborhood they lived in...
What a racist question.
L
Ask Biden and Bernie. They were there.
Only the black ones mattered.
One interesting theory is that we have the T-Rex’s arms wrong. The theory goes that his arms were actually wings, like an ostrich.
bkmk
BDM?
I am thankful that my kids were older when Barney became mainstream. I’d have shot myself had they not been.
“The theory goes that his arms were actually wings, like an ostrich”
Well, that would explain why ostriches have such a bad attitude.
I am more interested in the content of their character.
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