aaelghat:
On a semi-related note, on a museum tour about dinosaurs, I was told that we really don’t know what color the various species of dinosaurs really were. They could have been green, purple, striped, etc.
Whenever you see a re-construction of a dinosaur, they took a complete guess at the skin color.
Interesting article here .
From the article:
The colours of a bird that lived 120 million years ago have been revealed from trace remains of pigments on its fossil, and the same technique may be used to reveal the colours of dinosaurs.
Zoinks
July 2, 2011, 12:48pm
62
Lumpy:
When the idea that humans evolved from an apelike* ancestor first became widespread in the 19th century, there were different theories as to what the intermediate forms would have looked like. Modern humans have upright posture, a large brain, relative hairlessness, speech, and the ability to make and use tools routinely, all of which apes mostly don’t. Exactly which traits changed at what rate no one knew. The cliche’ of Neandertal Man having a slouching posture was accepted because no one knew when fully upright posture first began. The infamous Piltdown Man hoax endured because it fit one proposed model of development- a large brain with primitive jaws. We now believe that the approximate order of development was upright posture, hairlessness, progressively large brain, progressively more sophisticated tool making, and probably speech only within the last 150,000 years or so.
*Yes, I’ve heard a million times “humans didn’t evolve from apes; humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor”. Which probably was hairy, arboreal with opposing big toes, and had a pronounced muzzle. What any person would call an “ape” if they saw it.
Humans are apes according to scientific classification, we just evolved from one type of ape to another type of ape. If you want to get slightly more technical then we are classified among the great apes along with gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans.