By Neeraj Namburu<\/p>\n
You might be thinking, \u201cYeah green or maybe some shades of gray and brown, right?\u201d Jurassic park showed off these amazing grayish brown T-rex\u2019s, but has anyone actually seen a dinosaur to confirm that. I sure haven\u2019t, and right now the last dinosaur was alive 65 million years ago, so we can\u2019t just go and look at one to confirm. We know a lot about what dinosaurs looked like from their fossil records. We know how the bones fit together by comparing the dinosaurs to their closest animal relatives \u2014 that would be birds by the way. We know how their muscles might fit together by looking at the patterns on the bones. We can even tell if they were scaly or not based on the imprints in the ground near the fossils, but one thing we don\u2019t know for sure is the skin color. Bones are really nice because they\u2019re tough, so they\u2019ll stay preserved for millions of years if the conditions are right. Skin, however, is really soft so it\u2019s harder to find an intact skin sample from dinosaurs. Even the most detailed skin samples don\u2019t tell us a lot about color, so it\u2019s really been a lot of imagination up to this point.
\nToday, scientists in the field of paleocolor are trying to learn more about what color dinosaurs really are. The key is studying these really tiny structures called melanosomes which tell us what pigments or color particles could be on the dinosaur. Scientists can use these clues to estimate what color a dinosaur might be. By studying these pigments, scientists have even found that some dinosaurs might have rainbow-like skin qualities. For now, we can\u2019t know for sure what color every dinosaur was, and we can\u2019t be too certain about our own guesses. It\u2019s only a matter of time, though, until we learn more about these ancient dinosaurs. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Neeraj Namburu You might be thinking, \u201cYeah green or maybe some shades of gray and brown, right?\u201d Jurassic park showed off these amazing grayish brown T-rex\u2019s, but has anyone actually seen a dinosaur to confirm that. I sure haven\u2019t, and right now the last dinosaur was alive 65 million years ago, so we can\u2019t…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":680,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-calender"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentorg.vanderbilt.edu\/vsvs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentorg.vanderbilt.edu\/vsvs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentorg.vanderbilt.edu\/vsvs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentorg.vanderbilt.edu\/vsvs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/680"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentorg.vanderbilt.edu\/vsvs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2013"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/studentorg.vanderbilt.edu\/vsvs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2014,"href":"https:\/\/studentorg.vanderbilt.edu\/vsvs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2013\/revisions\/2014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentorg.vanderbilt.edu\/vsvs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentorg.vanderbilt.edu\/vsvs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentorg.vanderbilt.edu\/vsvs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}