Experiment Will Determine Dinosaur's Skin Color 98
AchilleTalon writes "One of the only well preserved dinosaur skin samples ever found is being tested at the Canadian Light Source (CLS) synchrotron to determine skin color and to explain why the fossilized specimen remained intact after 70-million years. University of Regina physicist Mauricio Barbi said the hadrosaur, a duck-billed dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous period (100-65 million years ago), was found close to a river bed near Grand Prairie, Alberta."
Re:Quite interresting (Score:5, Informative)
The hadrosaur under study is an ornithischian - a very, very distant relative that's more closely related to Stegosaurus and Triceratops. Psittacosaurus, a primitive horned dinosaur, did have tail bristles, but they appear to have been decorative for display and not feather-like at all.
Re:I don't see color (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Dinosaurs closer to Birds (Score:4, Informative)
Why do birds descending from dinosaurs rule out reptiles descending from dinosaurs?
Given the huge amount of dinosaur races, wouldn't it be more likely that different dinosaur races evolved into different types of animals over time? This would make them equally related to dinosaurs, but not the same dinosaurs. For all we know their common ancestor could be a pre dinosaur animal even though both were dinosaurs at one point in time.
Actually dinosaurs (and birds now) are reptiles, but they're not lizards. While dinosaurs and lizards (and crocodilians) are descended from the same family tree, the dinosaurs and birds have very distinguishable anatomic differences. Dinos and birds have their legs stretched under them, while the rest of the reptiles have their legs stretched out of the sides.
Re:Dinosaurs closer to Birds (Score:2, Informative)
Birds' color variation is typically in their feathers, not their skin.
And birds are dinosaurs. The dinosaurs didn't become extinct, they just suffered a massive loss of biodiversity. Only a tiny tiny slice of dinosaur species made it through the extinction event, and they lead to today's birds.