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What color were dinosaurs? When did animals start being different colors at all?
[MUSIC]
I'm Anthony Carboni, this is DNews, and color is a crazy useful tool for animal survival.
Some are colored to blend into their environment. Some venomous animals like snakes use bright
colors for the opposite reason- to specifically say 'here I am, do not screw with me,' which
is called aposematism, from the latin for badass. Colors can mean anything from 'yo,
I am ready to mate' to 'hey, man, I'm a different species than you, I'm not in competition with
you.' But when did all that start?
Most animal coloring comes from melanosomes, these organelles inside of cells that make
melanin- which gives color and also protects from the sun. In a study published in Nature,
scientists have been able to recover some melanosomes from fossils of dinosaur feathers,
and they found similarities to living animals that allowed them to make some inferences-
which is fancy talk for "man, we have no idea what millions of years and fossilization did
to these melanosomes, but here are some thoughts."
Anchiornis was black, white, and gray with a red crest on its head.
Sinosauropteryx seemed to be orange with a striped tail. It looks like Archeopteryx was
all black.
So how'd that red and orange get there- when did all these animals start us on the road
to the multicolored animal insanity we see today? Well, it seems like genetic mutation
started color changes in a very small way- and then something happened in the late Jurassic
period, specifically with a type of dinosaur called maniraptors. All of a sudden, 140-something
million years ago, all kinds of different melanosome shapes started appearing.
All flying dinosaurs belong belong to the maniraptor group- researchers say that sometime,
right before the origin of flight, when dinosaur feathers changed from these tiny fuzzy things
to the feather-shapes we recognize now, there was a huge explosion in color variation.
That's leading researchers to believe that melanosome diversity is linked to big, physical
changes in an animal. Feather shape and metabolism changes to let a dinosaur fly, and its color
changes along with it. That could mean color isn't just about an animal's environment or
behavior, it's linked to what it's physically made to do.
And since melanosomes similar to dinosaurs' can be found in living animals, we might be
able to compare them and use them to find out new information about the physical makeup
of dinosaurs. All this stuff is speculative right now, but it's crazy interesting to think
about- color linked to function. Like video game enemies.