Biology gives you a brain. Life turns in into a mind ~Jeffrey Eugenides

It’s common knowledge nowadays that the scaly reptilian dinosaurs we all grew up picturing was an assumption on appearance. Dinosaurs, from the smallest to the largest were actually covered in feathers, resulting in their ancestors, the bird. Archaeologists have always had trouble picturing the prehistoric creatures colors and textures, but adding feathers to the equation gave an entirely new variable to add onto the confusion, until now.

Scientists have discovered a way to use fossils, feathers and x-ray technology to examine and find the colors of the dinosaurs feathers. The researchers, led by the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, collected feathers from birds whose ancestry lead directly back to known dinosaur species. They then x-rayed the feathers and examined their unique chemical compounds. Melanin, the pigment responsible for dark skin tones in humans and dark feathers in birds, is one of the key parts of the experiment. When x-rayed, melanin containing feathers were found to have multiple “layers” of elements such as zinc, sulfur and calcium. Depending on the specific binding of these elements to each other results in the color of the feather. While there are hundreds of different ways to bind multiple elements in the feathers, once they are discovered to a certain degree, fossils of long extinct dinosaurs and prehistoric animals can be examined and matched to the different elements found within the surface of the fossils. With this information, scientists are one step closer to being able to accurately and precisely recreate models of the dominating dinosaurs that fascinate everyone.