Experiment Will Determine Dinosaur's Skin Color

AchilleTalon writes "One of the only well preserved dinosaur skin samples ever found is being tested at the Canadian Light Source (CLS) synchrotron to determine skin color and to explain why the fossilized specimen remained intact after 70-million years. University of Regina physicist Mauricio Barbi said the hadrosaur, a duck-billed dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous period (100-65 million years ago), was found close to a river bed near Grand Prairie, Alberta."

Comments

Re:Quite interresting

[Webs 101]

It's unlikely that this creature had feathers. Feathers are only known in Coelurosauria, which is a subset of theropods that, for example, includes Tyrannosaurus but not Allosaurus.

The hadrosaur under study is an ornithischian - a very, very distant relative that's more closely related to Stegosaurus and Triceratops. Psittacosaurus, a primitive horned dinosaur, did have tail bristles, but they appear to have been decorative for display and not feather-like at all.