Washington, February 07: Some dinosaurs had russet-coloured feathers, and one jazzy specimen had a Mohawk crest and stripes, researchers say in the first reports to confidently assign colours to dinosaurs.
Their colours have long been a subject of speculation among researchers and schoolchildren.
In the new study, reported in Thursday’s online edition of the journal Science, scientists focused on melanosomes, which impart colour.
They were able to assign colour to individual feathers and thus work out colour patterns for the entire fossil of Anchiornis huxleyi, a small, feathered, two-legged dinosaur that lived roughly 150 million years ago.
The animal would have weighed about 110 grams and appears to have had a dark gray or black body and wings with some white feathers that gave it a stripe pattern, plus a reddish-brown crest and speckles on the face.
—Agencies