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Researchers Find Color In Fossils
Science News has a look at the latest paleontological fashion: what may be the remains of pigment in fossilized feathers 100 million years old. The material in question is believed to be black melanin, on the evidence of its similarity in scanning-microscope images to the modern pigment. The researchers are hopeful of identifying other varieties of melanin, which provide red or yellow coloration; and also possibly of spotting fossilized nanostructures of melanin that create iridescent patterns in some modern animals.
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ok? So why is this so special? I understand melanin may degrade easily, but hasn't a lot of similar organic matter been found in fossils earlier?
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The dinosaurs were made extinct because they were black.
Kanye West says "God Doesn't Care About Blacks."
I've seen the evidence. Color evolved when Dorothy was whisked away to OZ.
I record my sleeptalking
This article is wrong. God created America and the world 3000 years ago, so these stupid scientists must be wrong about their dates!
Science is so awesome, in the most original sense of the word. It inspires awe.
Look at what these people are doing. They have odd bits of animals that died uncountable millions of years ago (except they figured out ways of counting them) and put the bits back together. And now they think they can figure out what colour they were? That is fantastic!
Anyone who says that the knowledge of why and how things work somehow ruins the experience has no real wonder in their soul. There is nothing more awe inspiring than pulling back the curtain on some new piece of knowledge.
Don't get me wrong. I understand that it's a big deal to get anything out of something so old. It's just they're making a big deal out of what can then be done with the pigment, and that seems a bit silly.
Catch telemarketers
Yeah right. Who cares what color the dinosaurs were? They are all dead now. Will this cause you to change what breakfast cereal you eat?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I found this out a long time ago.....when I took color photographs of fossils!
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Usually there is no hint of the original colour preserved in fossils, but colour patterns have been found in plenty of fossils of a variety of ages and types and have been known since at least the 1930s (check this book chapter). Unfortunately there are no pictures in these web sources. You'll have to look up the sources on paper, sorry.
What sort of things preserve colour patterns? There are cone-shaped nautiloids from the Devonian of Germany with zig-zag and linear stripe patterns, snail and other shells with stripes or spots, insects from Brazil (Cretaceous) and Utah (Eocene) whose wings have preserved colour patterns, and, as the article hints, bird feathers with colour patterns have been known for decades. Because they are only patterns, it isn't known what the original colours were (for all we know it could have been a boring brown versus grey or something exotic like green and purple), but it's better than nothing, and even finding the patterns is quite rare.
What's news in the posted article is only the part about the possibility of melanin or something derived from it being preserved. So, it's a bit of progress on what, exactly, is being preserved in these colour patterns.
There's one instance I know of where the actual colour of the ancient creature is preserved as a fossil: a beetle from a famous locality in Germany called Messel. Here's a picture, and here's a news article. As seen in quite a few modern beetles, the colour isn't caused by pigment but by irridescence (i.e. light interference) due to the microscopic structure of the insect's wing covers. It's analogous in some ways to the rainbow of colours you see on the bottom of a CD due to the pits on the surface. In animals this is sometimes called "structural colour". The preservation at Messel is so good that this fine detail was preserved, and the beetle therefore still has it's colour visible!
Can this be used as oil? If so, when can it be put into use? If not, why should I give a fuck?
Any word on whether Jesus was black or not?
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
"Back in the day" my mother was taken to see a showing of "The Delhi Durbar" A colour documentary done by the BBC about 1912 because it was so expencive to make they would probably never make another colour film and my grandfather wanted all his kids to see at least one colur film in their lives.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
A couple of days ago, I found myself looking up birds on Wikipedia (don't ask why, my attention wanders) and found an interesting note on blue jays.
I'm not a bird watcher, so I don't know if this is just an anomaly specific to blue birds.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
recruitment, but Satan's dick And Inv3nting excuses
Of course he was, but unlike Rufus he was left in the Bible.
I was just thinking when I read this, at sometime in the evolutionary history of the earth, color probably didn't matter at all. The organisms were probably just "randomly" colored, that is, evolution didn't favor any specific color. Then eventually, species developed optic sensors, and then began to put meaning to the color, slowly weeding out individuals that displayed a color associated with negative features. So the it wouldn't be surpricing if the actual colors of the first organisms are kind of off-putting to the creatures of today. Or, they were just shades of grey....
Man imagine if Darwin hadn't been inspired by looking at bugs as a youth. Imagine if he hadn't paused to wonder at the variety of finches in the Galapagos because those details didn't solve any "bigger" problems. This is an amazing discovery. Who knows where the knowledge gained here might lead. If nothing else, its a link in the chain of our understanding of the past. And that alone is valuable.
How about cow poo? Cow poo is probably worse:
- Low energy density.
- Slow and mostly invariant energy release via intermediate substances.
- Smells. Smells like poo.
A closely related substance does have one major advantage - it's apparently available in virtually infinite quantities.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Researchers also found a 100 million year old woman's jawbone.
How did they know it was a woman's?????? ... It was still moving
Like the beaver, it's just Dam one thing after another