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For the longest time, artists could only speculate about what dinosaurs looked like. Sure, we could reconstruct their silhouettes from their bones, but the colour of their skin was a mystery. That’s not quite true anymore. Thanks to some well preserved fossils and some ingenuous detective work, scientists have started to assign the right palettes to these prehistoric reptiles.
The latest species to get this treatment is Microraptor. This Chinese dinosaur was about the size of a crow. Its body was covered in feathers. Long plumes on both its arms and legs gave it a distinctive four-winged, baggy-trousered look, and may have allowed it to glide or fly. And thanks to a new study by Quanguo Li form the Beijing Museum of Natural History, we know that Microraptor was probably black and certainly shiny.
It was a iridescent dinosaur, with the same metallic sheen that you see on today’s hummingbirds, peacocks, and swallows. If you travelled back in time and stumbled across Microraptor, you might think that you’d found a Cretaceous starling.
Li’s study was led by Jakob Vinther, who...
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