One of the highlights of going to a natural history museum is seeing the ancient, the
extinct, the giant -- animals like dinosaurs are huge attractions, but the thing is…
what you can see isn’t entirely accurate…
the color’s all wrong.
Some of the first dinosaur fossils were discovered in the 17th century.
The discoverer thought it was part of a giant human!
It wasn’t for nearly two centuries that scientists would realize these bones belonged
not to giants, dragons or pre-flood Biblical creatures, but to multi-million-year-old dinosaurs.
Immediately, scientists started trying to gather and arrange bones and fragments into
shapes and species -- many of which they (very famously) got wrong.
Putting bones together, and knowing what a dinosaur looks like is a big leap.
And that’s where PaleoArt comes in!
Imagine for a second you have never seen a living human, no one has.
But someone found a fossilized skeleton.
You don’t know much about this animal, or what it looked like on the outside.
What does its skin look like, does it have scales?
Fur?
Feathers?
What color would the skin be?
Would it be camouflaged?
Someone who looks into this, would be a PaleoArtist.
These artists recreate extinct animals and plants, and they’re they ones who decided
what color dinosaur skin actually is.
Because tbh, no one knows.
In the 19th century, paleoartists took dinosaur bones; and they used contemporary giants like
elephants and rhinos as well as reptiles to inspire their idea of what animals would have
that skeleton.
This is how we got massive, tail-dragging animals plodding hither and thither.
Not accurate.
Over time, scientists debated the finer points of these animals.
Like, whether the head was held up above the body -- like a giraffe, or at body level.
How would they pump blood?
How would these bones move if they had muscles… and the drawings evolved...
By the 1960s and 70s, dinosaurs had trimmed up, they were looking lighter and fitter -- and
less grey!
More colorful!
But the skin…
THE SKIN.
We’ve found fossilized skin, and it can tell us the texture, look, and feel of a dinosaur,
but not color.
Fossilization turns dino hyde to stone -- meaning no melanin, no melanosomes, no color.
At least, not that we can see…
In 2013 a Canadian scanning company took a textured bit of skin and bounced infrared
wavelengths off of it hoping to reveal the fossilized melanosomes -- the bits of skin
that hold its color.
They based this on earlier studies that tried to see if fossilized melanosome shapes could
show us what color they were.
People really want to know this y’all.
Aaaaand, they’re still researching…
They’ve used this method successfully with well-preserved feathers, which dinosaurs were
definitely covered in.
And FEATHERS could have had numerous colors, just like the birds dinosaurs evolved into.
But feathers aren’t skin color.
Though it’s maddening -- scientists are still in the dark on this.
The “most accurate depiction” of a dinosaur (as it was billed) makes the tiny Psittacosaurus
look cute, and… brown -- which they found by lasers scanning the melanosomes in the
skin!
But the connection is debated.
And, as long as we’re copying birds, coloring is often sex specific.
Females are brown, but males are flashy.
That said the shading camouflage makes this one of the most accurate dinosaur depictions
ever!
For now.
Ultimately, and for much of our depictive history of these animals, we’ve sort of
been… ‘winging it’ using data that’s available at the time!
But everything may change soon.
In May 2017, a beautifully preserved fossilized nodosaur was revealed…
found in a Canadian mine!
It was basically mummified!
They scanned the skin and found the presence of reddish pigments!
RED.
ISH!
Aaand that’s it so far.
We can’t get pics.
They’re exclusive!
But, I’m sure you can find them.
This dinosaur is gorgeous, we got the hook up on pics Royal Tyrrell Museum in Canada.
If you notice, still no color.
It just looks like stone.
But, they scanned the skin and found the presence of reddish pigments!
RED.
ISH!
It’s not a much, but a start!
In the end, the dinosaurs in your imagination was seeded by the imagination of paleoartists.
Their work is what created dinosaurs in movies, museums and theme parks.
They fill in the skin on top of the skeletons, creating this rich tapestry of ancient life…
and for now, a fictional one…
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