“Evidence Builds on Color of Dinosaurs.”

“Zimmer, Carl. “Evidence Builds on Color of Dinosaurs.” The New York Times. 4 February 2010.”

Up until last week paleontologists cold not offer clear evidence on the colors of dinosaurs. Last week paleontologists could provide evidence that a dinosaur known as Sinosauropteryx had a ginger and white colored tail. Now though a team of these scientists has published an extremely detailed photo of another dinosaur, they believe they have found its colorings. One particular scientist Dr. Prum and his colleagues took advantage of the fact that feathers of some dinosaurs contain melanosomes- commonly know as pigment sacs. In 2009 it was proven that melanosomes survived for many years in the feathers of birds. The shape and the arrangement of the melanosomes help produce the color of the feathers, so clues about the colors of dinosaurs were found in the melanosomes alone. This outstanding discovery prompted scientists in places such as Britain and China to examine dinosaur fossils that are covered in feather-like structures. Take out the melanosomes and inspect them. Scientists began to work on finding the colorings of a species known as an Anchiornoris, the removed 29 small chips from the animals’ feathers. They found melanosomes in these chips therefore allowing them to figure out its coloring.
This article is important because, though there is clear evidence that these creatures did exist, we’ve never really had a clear image of what they look like. Now that these scientist have discovered these melanosomes in the feathers, we now can figure out what dinosaurs*with feathers* really do look like, which is very interesting. It makes the image of the dinosaur much more realistic because now we have one more clue as to what they really look like. I chose this article because I thought it was very interesting that scientist could figure something like this out, even though dinosaurs existed so very long ago.
I believe that in this article though it was very well written, was difficult to understand at points. For someone who is not a scientist or paleontologist some of the terms in this article were tough to understand, making the article as a whole a little difficult to get. Overall though I believe it gave pretty good insight on how scientist can now figure out how to find the color of dinosaurs.

C. Blatt