It’s probably hard to believe, but there was a time, not that long ago, when scientists thought dinosaurs were extinct. No, seriously! That was before paleontologists began to understand the impressive anatomical similarities between fossil dinos and living birds. The icing on the cake: a series of discoveries, starting in the 1990s, showing that some dinosaurs even sported feathers. It’s no longer even slightly controversial to claim that birds are descended from dinosaurs, and even that they are dinosaurs—the only branch of the family that survived a massive comet strike 65 million years ago.
With that relationship firmly established, scientists have moved on to looking at some more finely grained questions, and a new paper in Nature is casting light on one of them: since the feathers of modern birds are often intensely colorful, how much color did their extinct cousins display? The answer, it turns out, is probably a lot. Feathers, says Julia Clarke, of the University of Texas, Austin, one of the paper’s co-authors, were brightly colored from the time they first appeared in Maniraptoran dinosaurs, including oviraptors and dromaeosaurs.
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