October 3, 2016:

by Lydia Willgress

It is a bizarre mystery that has baffled scientists for millions of years; exactly what colour were dinosaurs?

But a team of researchers may have eventually discovered the answer, finding that some of them had ginger hair.

An analysis of pigments taken from the feathers of birds descended from dinosaurs has found they had the same colour hair as humans, including blonde, red and brown.

The metals that cause the different shades of hair have also since been found in fossil remains.
“The avian descendants of dinosaurs have kept the chemical key to unlocking colour precisely locked in their feather chemistry”
Professor Phil Manning

The discovery, by an international team led by researchers the University of Manchester, means scientists can now identify the true colour of dinosaurs, as well as other extinct animals, by reconstructing the chemical markers found in fossils.

Professor Roy Wogelius, the study’s senior author, said the results were the end of an “amazing journey”, which should lead to the team being able to accurately predict what dozens of dinosaurs looked like.

"It's one of the big unknowns, kids like to look at bones and imagine what a Tyrannosaurus rex would actually look like,” he said.

"A fundamental rule in geology is that the present is the key to the past. This work on modern animals will now provide another chemical 'key' for helping us to accurately reconstruct the appearance of long extinct animals."

Professor Phil Manning, the study’s co-author, added: "The avian descendants of dinosaurs have kept the chemical key to unlocking colour precisely locked in their feather chemistry."

Traces of the eumelanin, which leaves behind copper, and pheomelanin, which leaves behind zinc, have now been found in creatures up to 120 million years old.

Prof Wogelius added that while a lot of the darker pigment - which results in darker hair - had been found, the team was “confident” that the number of dinosaurs with the pigment for red hair was “widespread”.

"There is lots of the dark pigment eumelanin in dinosaurs but we are confident that the lighter pigment pheomelanin was quite widespread,” he said.

It comes after paleontologists found colour-determining pigments in a well-preserved fossilized skeleton of an averaptoran in 2010.
“It's one of the big unknowns, kids like to look at bones and imagine what a Tyrannosaurus rex would actually look like”
Professor Roy Wogelius

Researchers from Virginia Tech and the University of Bristol also showed last year that pigment can be detected in mammal fossils.

Previously, many believed that dinosaur skin was grey or green in order to allow them to blend into the surrounding environment.

Prof Wogelius said: "There has been a recent drive in science to nano-sized things, but we're imaging on a large scale, looking at the whole feathers rather than just a small section.

"That means we will be able to restore big organisms like dinosaurs… we can now look at soft tissue and not just bones, something people thought wouldn't be possible.”

Dr Nick Edwards, a lead author, said: "Melanin is a very important component in biology, but its exact chemistry is still not precisely known, especially as to how metals such as calcium, copper and zinc interact with it.

"Here we have used a new approach to probe these components of melanin and have found that there are subtle but measurable differences between the different types of melanin with regards to certain elements."