I’m reading a new book on Salt Marshes with my nephew that has photographs of various shore birds, one being the Spoonbill - looking at these photos makes me wonder what correlation can be made between their varying colors and the color of dinosaurs. Check out some of their beaks, I wonder if dinos had multi colored heads? I know there is a connection with modern birds in skeletal structure and physiology - but what about color? Does anyone know a resource where they study paleocamouflage or some other obscure science relating to dinos and their color? I’ve got a 9 year old curious nephew eagerly awaiting…
Once upon a time, I was a dinosaur docent at the Field Museum in Chicago. We were trained to answer this question - which came up a lot - by telling the kids that dinosaurs were probably colored along the lines of modern reptiles, because it makes good evolutionary sense. But there was no way of knowing for sure.
I’m not sure where the feathers fit in, honestly.
Thank you! So thats what you guys are trained to say at the field museum? [envious of that job, btw] - thats really interesting, maybe the evolution of feathers came with a global temp decrease?
It was a volunteer position, and a really fun one! If you have a natural history museum in your area, I recommend asking if you can volunteer. I got the biggest kick out of talking with kids about our dinosaurs.
I really can’t remember what we learned about the feathered dinosaurs, I am ashamed to admit. We even had a big exhibit on feathered dinosaurs from China, but I was really busy at the time and couldn’t come into the museum for a couple months, missed the training, and therefore wasn’t qualified to docent for it.
Maybe someone else can answer.
Nobody knows for sure, but there isn’t any reason that they should not have been just as brightly colored as today’s range of animals. Chances are that many of them had complex sexual displays and camouflaging designs.
It’s impossible to say for sure, since any colored organic matter has long since decayed. However, I recently read that they uncovered an imprint of a dinosaur skin impression that displayed a striped hue pattern. They don’t know exactly what colors they were, just that it was a pattern of light and dark. So at least one dinosaur had stripes!
Many, if not most dinosaurs in the cretaceous had feathers. There were in fact flying dinosaurs in a loose sense (pterodactyls technically aren’t dinosaurs). They had plumage on their arms and legs and could presumably glide between trees like flying squirrels. I imagine feather patterns back then varied as wildly as they do on modern birds.
I don’t know why but the notion of colorful dinosaurs [ala parrots] is very appealing. It almost brings them a little closer to reality - away from just bones to living breathing animals. That and the idea that t-rex may have been colored like a rainbow seem pretty cool to me.
I would suspect that they weren’t as brightly colored as birds, though I’m not up on the current evidence.
But a key difference is that birds can fly (or their relatively recent ancestors could). This means a couple of things: 1) (many to most) birds don’t care if they’re visible to predators. 2) vision is much more important to flyers than hearing or smell. So signaling to potential mates needs to depend more on visual signals than odor or sound.
I think I prefer the notion that T-Rex had bright yellow, downy feathers*. With pink and orange legs. Maybe even a head ruff. Because that would be awesome.
[sub]*though it seems unlikely, given the existing scaly skin impressions. Maybe TR had down as a juvenile, though.[/sub]
Would these feathered tyrannosaurs have been co-existant with wooly mammoths?
How do you get down off an elephant?
You don’t. You get down off of a T-Rex.
Paging Colibri …
you know it…only, tuskless, earless ones
That would be Big Bird!
Big Bird with fangs would be mighty cool! Rip the head right off that frakkin’ Elmo.
For it to be useful for dinosaurs to have a wide range of color, they’d have to have evolved color vision. That does seem to be the case, based on several web sites. For example