Australian-Geographic-Magazine-September-Octobe..

72 Australian Geographic

I

N THE 1990s, any book, teacher or scientist would have told

you we’d never be able to tell anything about the colour of

extinct animals such as dinosaurs. The best we could ever do

was make comparisons with living creatures, and often reptiles

were deemed to be the best proxies. Most dinosaurs were painted

in shades similar to those of crocodiles or monitor lizards – greys,

greens and browns.

It seems puzzling now when you think about it. Birds and

mammals – from fairy wrens, peacocks, parrots and cassowaries,

to tigers, tree kangaroos, baboons and red pandas – boast a large

range of vibrant shades and hues, and even many lizards – from

chameleons to anoles – have striking patterns of colouration.

Since the discovery in China in 1996 of the fi rst feathered

dinosaur, Sinosauropteryx (more than 40 feathered species have

now been discovered, suggesting that most carnivorous dino-

saurs had feathers), the assumption had been that dinosaurs

might have had some of the same vast variation in plumage that

birds do today, but few people believed such a thing would ever

be confi rmed.

That was until January 2010, when a remarkable paper in

the scientifi c journal Nature suggested that Sinosauropteryx had

sported ginger and white stripes around its tail, perhaps some-

thing like the pattern found on ring-tailed lemurs today. “Oh

no, it’s Ginger-saurus! For fi rst time scientists uncover colour of

dinosaur and it was...a redhead” was one headline, in the UK’s

Daily Mail newspaper. The report went on to say: “As if its short

stature and ugly feathers weren’t enough to give it an inferiority

complex, one of the world’s best-preserved dinosaurs now turns

out to have been ginger.”

A jaunty illustration painted by Chuang Zhao and Lida Xing,

and released when the discovery was announced, depicts two

cheeky-looking, ginger-fl uff ed Sinosauropteryx. Their heads are

thrown back and each is cavorting on a single leg with arms fl ung

wide to impress or perhaps intimidate the other (Lida Xing is

the illustrator of the Australian dinosaurs poster, which is free

to subscribers with this issue).

The 2010 research study, from scientists in China and the

UK, also revealed black, white and orange-brown colouration

on the early bird Confuciusornis. Similar work has now revealed

the feather colours of Archaeopteryx and of four-winged fl ying

dinosaurs Anchiornis and Microraptor. These discoveries have

opened up a novel fi eld of research, allowing palaeontologists

to delve back more than 100 million years and probe the lives

of dinosaurs and early birds.

“Feathers are key to the success of birds and we can now

dissect their evolutionary history in detail,” Professor Mike

Benton, one of the experts behind the work at the University

of Bristol, told reporters. “The simplest feathers, in dinosaurs

such as Sinosauropteryx, were only present over limited parts of

its body – for example, as a crest down the midline of the back

Jurassic looker. Found in China in 2009,

150-million-year-old Anchiornis huxleyi

had long feathers on its hind- and

forelimbs. Fantastically preserved fossils

have allowed the feather colour to be

reconstructed, showing it was black with

white speckling and had a red head crest.

RISE OF THE ANIMALS WITH DAVID ATTENBOROUGH / COURTESY OF ATLANTIC PRODUCTIONS;

Anchiornis huxleyi

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