Dinosaur was orange!
The colour of some dinosaurs and early birds' feathers has been identified for the first time.
Dinosaur Sinosauropteryx had simple bristles - precursors of feathers - in alternate orange and white rings down its tail, and the early bird Confuciusornis had patches of white, black and orange-brown colouring, University of Bristol research revealed.
Scientists involved with the research, published in a report in journal Nature today, discovered feathers came before wings, so may not have originally been used for flight or insulation but for display.
Mike Benton, professor of palaeontology at the University of Bristol, said: "Our research provides extraordinary insights into the origin of feathers.
"In particular, it helps to resolve a long-standing debate about the original function of feathers - whether they were used for flight, insulation, or display.
"We now know that feathers came before wings, so feathers did not originate as flight structures.
"We therefore suggest that feathers first arose as agents for colour display and only later in their evolutionary history did they become useful for flight and insulation."
The team of palaeontologists report two kinds of "melanosomes" found in the feathers of numerous birds and dinosaurs from the world-famous Jehol beds of north east China.
Melanosomes are colour-bearing organelles, units within cells, buried within the structure of feathers and hair in modern birds and mammals, giving black, grey, and rufous tones such as orange and brown.
As melanosomes are an integral part of the tough protein structure of the feather, they survive when a feather survives, even for hundreds of millions of years.
Prof Benton said the research revealed that feathers in dinosaurs such as Sinosauropteryx were present only over limited parts of its body - such as a crest down the midline of the back and round the tail - and they would have had only a limited function in regulating the creature's temperature.
The report said the discovery added to the body of evidence that suggests modern birds evolved through a long line of flesh-eating dinosaurs.
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
