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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.
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
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.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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
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?
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!