I was coloring a dinosaur yesterday.
Thanks to my cats, I finally opened my new box of 152 Crayola crayons. Since then, I’ve been doing a lot of coloring. Yesterday, it was a dinosaur scene. Coloring the sky, sun, trees was easy, but I wondered for a moment what color to make the brontosaurus. I ended up using a nice, safe bronze, and I think he turned out well. But it made me wonder how professional artists know what color to make their dinosaurs.
For the most part, artists rely on modern animals for inspiration. Dinosaurs who lived in forests might have been a similar color to animals that live in forests today. But that still leaves a great deal of variety. Think of all the different birds (dinosaurs living today) out there. Non-avian dinosaurs might have been just as colorful.
New research has uncovered some answers. Some fossil feathers and skin have melanosomes, and these small organelles carry pigment. Modern birds also have these, so scientists know that these pigments come in black, grey, or red. By comparing the melanosomes on modern birds with those on fossil feathers, some dinosaurs show their true colors.
However, fossil feathers are very rare, and bones do not have melanosomes, so without time travel, we make never know the actual color of most dinosaurs. However, the more fossils we study, the more we will learn. Perhaps someday I’ll know the real color of the brontosaurus I colored. Until then, the bronze I chose looks good.