A study finds that there is a 50 percent chance that the common ancestor of birds and dinosaurs had bright colors on its skin, beaks and scales, but 0 percent chance that it had bright colors on its ...

For the longest time, we had no idea what color dinosaurs were. We could see their bones. We could study their size, their movement, and how they lived. But their actual appearance—what they looked ...

woodpecker feather (right side). Under the scanning electron microscope there are melanosomes in the dark but not the light areas of the fossil (far left arrows). The corresponding areas are shown at ...

For years, scientists have been left guessing about the true appearance of dinosaurs, particularly when it comes to their skin color. Fossilized skin rarely survives the passage of time, and without ...

In 2011 a heavy machine operator in a Canadian oilsands mine struck his shovel on an extraordinary find — the most exquisitely preserved armored dinosaur the world has ever seen. On Thursday, it ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American The fossil record is always surrounded by ...

In 1996 the scientific world was stunned to learn that a fossil dinosaur with feathers had been found in China. The animal, shown in a 1990s artist's reconstruction, was Sinosauropteryx, a turkey-size ...

image: Extinct dinosaurs may have had bright color on their skin, scales and beaks in a manner similar to modern birds, according to research led by The University of Texas at Austin. An artist’s ...

With little more than mineralized bones to study, scientists and artists have only been able to guess what color dinosaurs were. But a new study, utilizing scanning electron micrography, has detected ...