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Researchers Find Color In Fossils
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Aug 03, 2008 05:54 PM
from the any-color-as-long-as-it's-black dept.
from the any-color-as-long-as-it's-black dept.
Science News has a look at the latest paleontological fashion: what may be the remains of pigment in fossilized feathers 100 million years old. The material in question is believed to be black melanin, on the evidence of its similarity in scanning-microscope images to the modern pigment. The researchers are hopeful of identifying other varieties of melanin, which provide red or yellow coloration; and also possibly of spotting fossilized nanostructures of melanin that create iridescent patterns in some modern animals.
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background? (Score:1, Interesting)
ok? So why is this so special? I understand melanin may degrade easily, but hasn't a lot of similar organic matter been found in fossils earlier?
Re:background? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:background? (Score:5, Funny)
Quick! Someone go lobby congress for more science funding on behalf of the Hollywood studios!
It would probably work.
-
Parent
Re:background? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:1)
Could this be used to extract full strands of DNA? If so, could the extracted DNA be used to clone the original animal?
Re: (Score:2)
Can an imaging technique for pigments be used to extract DNA? I would be surprised.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
No, but it may change the color of the dinosaur on the cereal box.
Re:This is very, very important!!! (Score:4, Funny)
Unless it turns out that dinosaurs really were purple and green.
Parent
Re:This is very, very important!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
I suppose it is part of learning about the past.
I suppose that it is all about not wanting to remain ignorant.
I suppose it is an extension of "Those who fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it." Now, I'm sure plenty of ignorant people will reply about how we don't need to know about what color dinosaurs were to avoid following in their footsteps... and they would be right. However, once we start standardizing what parts of our past we don't need to learn about, the list grows until it includes things we SHOULD learn about and remember...
Then there is the whole thing about pigmentation, and if we find what pigmentation survives fossilization, we can make better, more permanent inks. It might turn out that creatures of a certain color lasted longer than others did, which could in turn assist our survival. Who knows what we could learn from this... except we know we can learn nothing from it if we don't study it.
But I doubt that even occurred to you.
you know.. all that bogus stuff that deals with knowledge.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You do make a very good point, but I'd like to point out that a big part of the reason why newer energy technologies are not being researched, has nothing whatsoever to do with funding. It doesn't matter a whit if money is going to scientists studying this fossilized pigmentation.
Since the early 60's, a gentleman in Arizona has been converting internal combustion engines of all types to run on hydrogen. The reason why this technology has not been explored more has nothing to do with funding, and everythin
Re: (Score:2)
No. The reason hydrogen hasn't been seriously considered are that it:
As an energy transfer medium, you'd be hard-pressed to do worse that hydrogen. That there are people on this site who still believe the trite crap about hydrogen is disturbing. I hope you don't write software, or that I don't use the software you do write: the sloppy thinking you exhibit in the above post is likely to spill over into other areas of your life
I call ... (Score:2)
How about cow poo? Cow poo is probably worse:
- Low energy density.
- Slow and mostly invariant energy release via intermediate substances.
- Smells. Smells like poo.
A closely related substance [jelks.nu] does have one major advantage - it's apparently available in virtually infinite quantities.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually the Sterling Engine that uses a small "sealed" container of hydrogen to transfer the heat from the focal point to where it heats water to steam, is quite efficient. Hydrogen is one of the best materials for transfer of heat.
And as far as being explosive... this is true. But I hope to Zeus that you aren't one of those nuts who believes that the Hindenburg blew up because of Hydrogen. I've watched demonstrations in how a hydrogen leak is not dangerous, because of how fast it dissipates. It also d
Re: (Score:2)
What you say doesn't make sense.
Research doesn't have to be incremental. If all research had to have an obvious purpose for you, by its own definition, science could not go further than what you are able to grasp. I don't think we can afford that.
For instance, you talk about studying cows chewing as something ridiculous. There is a lot of research like that, for two main purposes. One is improving productivity. The cow is a beef making machine, and knowing how it works can obviously improve yield. That mean
Re: (Score:3)
I'll concede that knowing dinosaur colors won't help us a damn bit. But not every outlet of government spending has to have an immediate tangible payback.
That's not the point. Funding artists doesn't help our society in the ways you demand. Neither do war memorials, publicly-financed philosophy departments, or Antarctic research stations.
However, as a society we believe these pursuits to have intrinsic value. If we are to pursue them, government must help, as not having any tangible benefit, businesses won'
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
I'd have to respectfully disagree with you on this. Knowing the color of dinosaurs in the past is not important, and putting time and effort into researching this is a mismanagement of resources. Instead of figuring out something so unimportant, we should be trying to figure out more important things. There are plenty of fields that need much more funding that can deliver useful results soon such as energy rela
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
The reason you study the past is really so you can understand the present. To most of us it's the present that maters. We study the historic past so that maybe we don't repeat those mistakes but learn from them instead.
Understanding the present natural world would be much easier if we had 20 other earth-like planets each slightly different then we could do a comparative study and understand how things like being more hot or colder and more or lass rain affects life. What a boon to environmental science h
Re:background? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, no. This is the first for colour, which is a pretty wild first. Not to mention that getting anything more than bone imprints is pretty new and exciting as well.
Quick review of how fossils form - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil#Types_of_preservation [wikipedia.org]
Mostly fossils are '3d rock shadows' of something imprinted millions of years ago. So while you understand melanin "may degrade easily", combine that understanding with the knowledge that these feather fossils are from something that died approximately *100 million years ago*. It's pretty wild to get colour info from that. Like much, much harder than getting useful specifications from Marketing.
And I guess it's special for /. because the BBC covered it a month ago...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7495961.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, I think that's not the case, by around a decade. It might be a first for pigmentation, but pigmentation is IIRC only one of 7 different ways of giving an organism "colour". Without digging through the reference books, around 1998 some fossils were discovered that contained structures whose dimensions indicated the presence of diffraction gratings and other elements of "structural colours".
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Now we know what really killed the dinosaurs: Racism. That's right, Jim Crowasaurus was alive and well in the Mezozoic Era. The dinosaurs were a proud race of pigmented creatures that lived peacefully for 160 million years, until their genocide by racist mammals. Oh, sure, racist mammal scientists will claim that it was an asteroid impact or volcanoes that killed the dinosaurs, but it was really a concerted plot by the mammals to push dinosaurs into ghettos, then flood those ghettos with AIDS and crack c
Re:Stupidity (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
No, he's pressed it so many times that it is worn out.
Re: (Score:1)
.<--*slap*
.<--'whoosh' comment
.<--deliberate misunderstanding to make joke
.<--me
.<--irony
.<--you
.<--backwards thinking
Hokey Pokey Science Fiction if you ask me (Score:5, Funny)
I've seen the evidence. Color evolved when Dorothy was whisked away to OZ.
Re:Hokey Pokey Science Fiction if you ask me (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, in fact you can watch that picture and see the change happen.
rj
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
am i the only one who needs to be rickrolled every now and then? i mean come on who dosent appreicate the impotent music of the 80's
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You obviously failed to listen to what the flower people said. Shhhh... [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:1)
If the warning was legitimate you'd probably have a point :)
Re:Hokey Pokey Science Fiction if you ask me (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
First Colour Movie (Score:2)
Science is so cool (Score:5, Insightful)
Science is so awesome, in the most original sense of the word. It inspires awe.
Look at what these people are doing. They have odd bits of animals that died uncountable millions of years ago (except they figured out ways of counting them) and put the bits back together. And now they think they can figure out what colour they were? That is fantastic!
Anyone who says that the knowledge of why and how things work somehow ruins the experience has no real wonder in their soul. There is nothing more awe inspiring than pulling back the curtain on some new piece of knowledge.
Re:Science is so cool (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Old News..... (Score:5, Funny)
I found this out a long time ago.....when I took color photographs of fossils!
Colour in fossils not exactly news ... (Score:5, Informative)
Usually there is no hint of the original colour preserved in fossils, but colour patterns have been found in plenty of fossils [sepmonline.org] of a variety of ages and types and have been known since at least the 1930s (check this book chapter [google.ca]). Unfortunately there are no pictures in these web sources. You'll have to look up the sources on paper, sorry.
What sort of things preserve colour patterns? There are cone-shaped nautiloids from the Devonian of Germany with zig-zag and linear stripe patterns, snail and other shells [jstor.org] with stripes or spots, insects from Brazil (Cretaceous) and Utah (Eocene) whose wings have preserved colour patterns, and, as the article hints, bird feathers with colour patterns have been known for decades. Because they are only patterns, it isn't known what the original colours were (for all we know it could have been a boring brown versus grey or something exotic like green and purple), but it's better than nothing, and even finding the patterns is quite rare.
What's news in the posted article is only the part about the possibility of melanin or something derived from it being preserved. So, it's a bit of progress on what, exactly, is being preserved in these colour patterns.
There's one instance I know of where the actual colour of the ancient creature is preserved as a fossil: a beetle [jstor.org] from a famous locality in Germany called Messel [wikipedia.org]. Here's a picture [uni-bonn.de], and here's a news article [nationalgeographic.com]. As seen in quite a few modern beetles, the colour isn't caused by pigment but by irridescence (i.e. light interference) due to the microscopic structure of the insect's wing covers. It's analogous in some ways to the rainbow of colours you see on the bottom of a CD due to the pits on the surface. In animals this is sometimes called "structural colour". The preservation at Messel is so good that this fine detail was preserved, and the beetle therefore still has it's colour visible!
All things being equal... (Score:2)
RS
How reliable is this discover? (Score:5, Interesting)
A couple of days ago, I found myself looking up birds on Wikipedia (don't ask why, my attention wanders) and found an interesting note on blue jays [wikipedia.org].
I'm not a bird watcher, so I don't know if this is just an anomaly specific to blue birds.
Re: (Score:1)
iridescence works in a similar way. I've got a shirt that's crimson or blue or blue/green depending on the angle you're at. Some species of butterfly have iridescent wings. Duck feathers sometimes iridesce (particularly neck feathers on mallards and pintails).
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That explains why blue jays turn black when I crush them!
Thanks - Now on to crushing cardinals!
Color and Evolution (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Kanye West says "God Doesn't Care About Blacks."
Then god wouldn't have given them ultra-large penises which will steal your woman in the blink of an eye.
Re: (Score:1, Funny)
I don't really understand why that is better than just getting the pigment out of a current animal's feathers or whatnot.
Yeah, why don't they jest go down to the store or some'n and buy a jar of pigment instead of messing with fossils and such.
Re: (Score:2)
Err...it's better than getting the pigment from a modern animal's feathers because the modern animals aren't 100 million year old proto-birds. You do know the difference between a fossil and a fresh corpse, right?
According to established Dogma (Score:2)
Of course he was, but unlike Rufus he was left in the Bible.
Re: (Score:2)
Any word on whether Jesus was black or not?
An official request to obtain His fossil remains for color sampling has been made to His last known whereabouts but diplomat H. Peter claims He is still alive.
Scientists, amazed at the age of Jesus, insisted to be given sample cell material for research on teleomeric decay, but H.Peter advised them to "have Faith".