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Fossilized Color
September/October 2008
by Bruce Fellman
When paleontology graduate student Jakob Vinther examined this 100-million-year-old fossil feather under a microscope, he
expected to see tiny sausage-shaped objects that scientists had previously
identified as fossil bacteria. He did, but he also recognized the objects—not
as bacteria, but as melanosomes, the organelles in modern creatures that give
rise to pigments.
Whereas bacteria would have been distributed evenly
throughout the feather, Vinther’s research team confirmed that the objects
exist only in the dark bands. The discovery, described in the July 9 issue of Biology
Letters, has
scientists excited about finally determining the colors of prehistoric birds
and dinosaurs.
In this fossil, the bands are black because the
melanosomes were preserved as carbon. Vinther identified them by shape as
eumelanosomes, which, as it happens, also produce black coloring in life.
Therefore, he says, the dinosaur that once wore this feather looked "more like
a woodpecker than a warbler.”  |
