Slashdot Mirror
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.
This will help us in creating more accurate simulated images of these animals.
I've seen the evidence. Color evolved when Dorothy was whisked away to OZ.
I record my sleeptalking
Kanye West says "God Doesn't Care About Blacks."
Then god wouldn't have given them ultra-large penises which will steal your woman in the blink of an eye.
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.
Well, no. This is the first for colour, which is a pretty wild first. Not to mention that getting anything more than bone imprints is pretty new and exciting as well.
Quick review of how fossils form - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil#Types_of_preservation
Mostly fossils are '3d rock shadows' of something imprinted millions of years ago. So while you understand melanin "may degrade easily", combine that understanding with the knowledge that these feather fossils are from something that died approximately *100 million years ago*. It's pretty wild to get colour info from that. Like much, much harder than getting useful specifications from Marketing.
And I guess it's special for /. because the BBC covered it a month ago...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7495961.stm
You forgot to press your CAPS LOCK KEY before beginning to type...
Requiem for the American Dream
Quick! Someone go lobby congress for more science funding on behalf of the Hollywood studios!
It would probably work.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
No, but it may change the color of the dinosaur on the cereal box.
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!
I suppose it is part of learning about the past.
I suppose that it is all about not wanting to remain ignorant.
I suppose it is an extension of "Those who fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it." Now, I'm sure plenty of ignorant people will reply about how we don't need to know about what color dinosaurs were to avoid following in their footsteps... and they would be right. However, once we start standardizing what parts of our past we don't need to learn about, the list grows until it includes things we SHOULD learn about and remember...
Then there is the whole thing about pigmentation, and if we find what pigmentation survives fossilization, we can make better, more permanent inks. It might turn out that creatures of a certain color lasted longer than others did, which could in turn assist our survival. Who knows what we could learn from this... except we know we can learn nothing from it if we don't study it.
But I doubt that even occurred to you.
you know.. all that bogus stuff that deals with knowledge.
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
Unless it turns out that dinosaurs really were purple and green.
So this could rule out purple and green dinosaurs, yellow protoceratops, and orange hadrosaurs. What next? You're going to tell me that dinosaurs didn't sing and dance with little children, were taller than 6' 2" and weren't overflowing with uncomfortable kindness?
Now we know what really killed the dinosaurs: Racism. That's right, Jim Crowasaurus was alive and well in the Mezozoic Era. The dinosaurs were a proud race of pigmented creatures that lived peacefully for 160 million years, until their genocide by racist mammals. Oh, sure, racist mammal scientists will claim that it was an asteroid impact or volcanoes that killed the dinosaurs, but it was really a concerted plot by the mammals to push dinosaurs into ghettos, then flood those ghettos with AIDS and crack cocaine. The racist mammal police always kept the dinosaurs down as well, profiling them on the basis of their pigmented leathery skin.
Now, how will we, as mammals, inheritors to a legacy of racism, atone for the crimes of our small furry ancestors? The only answer can be reparations to the dinosaurs. Given that our entire society is built on the horrors of the dinosaur genocide, I can only throw out a ballpark figure- say 100 trillion dollars- as small recompense for the atrocities of the past. As there are currently no dinosaurs to pay reparations to, I will humbly assume the burden of acting as custodian for this fund, only withdrawing maintenance fees as needed, and with the promise of paying out a fair share to any disadvantaged dinosaur who makes a claim.
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!
I'd have to respectfully disagree with you on this. Knowing the color of dinosaurs in the past is not important, and putting time and effort into researching this is a mismanagement of resources. Instead of figuring out something so unimportant, we should be trying to figure out more important things. There are plenty of fields that need much more funding that can deliver useful results soon such as energy related science and technology. Funding scientists to study color pigments in fossils would divert crucial resources from more important subjects. Also you say that standardizing parts of our past that we don't know about would be a mistake. I agree with you on this, but deciding here and now that the color of dinosaurs is not that important right now and should not be funded for the time being is in no way standardizing anything. We could always decide later that this information is actually important and revise our earlier decision. The point is that choosing to fund something that isn't important (as you yourself admitted) solely out of fear of later misjudging the importance of knowing something is illogical and makes little sense. But of course, scientists particularly interested in this are free to study to their hearts content. Just don't let them suck money from other scientists whose work will definitely benefit humanity in a huge way.
You do make a very good point, but I'd like to point out that a big part of the reason why newer energy technologies are not being researched, has nothing whatsoever to do with funding. It doesn't matter a whit if money is going to scientists studying this fossilized pigmentation.
Since the early 60's, a gentleman in Arizona has been converting internal combustion engines of all types to run on hydrogen. The reason why this technology has not been explored more has nothing to do with funding, and everything to do with large companies that deal in oil having the money to pay lobbyists to push their interests through congress, fund research to further the use of their product, and having the power and money to squash things like Hydrogen Technology. I've seen the guys videos, I've read his literature, I've met the man. His simplest demonstration really says it all. He simply removes the carb from a Briggs and Stratton engine, sticks a feed from a tank of hydrogen directly into the hole left behind, opens the tank and starts the engine. How fast the engine goes is decided by how much hydrogen he lets flow into the engine. He doesn't even modify anything (unless pulling the carb off is modification).
Also, the US government in the late 80's funded a research project that studied how often cows chew their cud. This project received $250,000. At about the same time, the US government funded a study into how often people smile in bowling alleys. This project received $375,000. These amounts of money might be drops in the bucket, however, these two projects are both far more useless than studying pigmentation in something we thought previously lacked pigmentation... namely fossils. And there are far more projects receiving money out there that are just as ludicrous as cud chewing or pleasant bowling alleys. I dunno.
So it's one thing when worthy projects are competing for the same money as unworthy projects. It's another when money is actively being spent to suppress technologies that would supplant the suppressor. In the case of energy tech, there have always been large entities that do not want us researching alternate ways of putting them out of business.
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
I'll concede that knowing dinosaur colors won't help us a damn bit. But not every outlet of government spending has to have an immediate tangible payback.
That's not the point. Funding artists doesn't help our society in the ways you demand. Neither do war memorials, publicly-financed philosophy departments, or Antarctic research stations.
However, as a society we believe these pursuits to have intrinsic value. If we are to pursue them, government must help, as not having any tangible benefit, businesses won't touch these programs. And why should they? Government ought to be a manifestation of what we consider important, and when the government funds programs like these, it's working well.
Even simpler than that: it is cool to find out stuff, regardless of its importance (as initially perceived!).