Beipiaosaurus

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Time: Early Cretaceous (~125 million years ago)

Region: Liaoning Province, China

Formation: Yixian Formation

Coloration Data

The morphology of melanosomes identified in fossilized feathers from the neck region of specimen BMNHC PH000911 indicates a brown coloration. The coloration of the rest of the body remains unresolved due to a lack of chemical or morphological data from other feather tracts. The authors caution that inferring coloration exclusively from melanosome geometry can be problematic for non-avian dinosaurs and pterosaurs bearing filamentous integuments. In modern non-avian reptiles, for example, melanosomes show uniform morphologies that do not correlate with epidermal color; a robust link between melanosome shape and pigment type is reliably established only in extant birds and mammals. Nonetheless, subsequent investigations — such as coloration studies on pterosaurs and juvenile diplodocids — have revealed distinct melanosome populations, suggesting that coloration in these lineages may also have been tied to melanosome morphology, much like in modern birds.

Method: Scanning electron microscopy (SEM).

Publications

• Quanguo Li, Julia A. Clarke, Ke-Qin Gao, Chang-Fu Zhou, Qingjin Meng, Daliang Li, Liliana D’Alba & Matthew D. Shawkey (2014)
  An article on the relationship between the shape of melanosomes and coloration in a large number of fossil species from various groups.
• Arindam Roy, Michael Pittman, Evan T. Saitta, Thomas G. Kaye, Xing Xu (2020)
  An overview article on the paleo‑coloration of amniotes.

Documents and files

• Li_et_al_2014.pdf (PDF)
  Article from Nature on the relationship between melanosome shape and coloration.
• Roy_et_al_2020.pdf (PDF)
  Review article on amniote paleocolor in Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society.

Reconstructions

Fossils

Size comparison