There are a few steps between discovering an animal’s fossil and sussing out what it actually looked like. Step one, as this Smithsonian guide explains, is to put the bones together, drawing on ...

What color were the dinosaurs? Watching the Jurassic Park movies, the answer seems clear: gray, brown or, at best, dull green. in a new book, British paleontologist David Hone dryly asks: "Has there ...

For the first time ever, paleontologists can look at dinosaurs in color. In last week's issue of the journal Nature, scientists described the discovery of melanosomes, biological structures that give ...

Who decides what color dinosaurs are? It's more art than science in many cases. — -- Michael Skrepnick isn’t a paleontologist, but he may have done more to influence your notion of what dinosaurs ...

Remember drawing dinosaurs in grade school, when the teacher would tell you to use any color you like, because we’ll never know for sure what these amazing prehistoric beasts looked like? Forget that ...

The stories of dinosaurs’ lives may be written in fossilized pigments, but scientists are still wrangling over how to read them. In September, paleontologists deduced a dinosaur’s habitat from ...

Asking what color dinosaurs were is like asking what color birds are. The group is huge and diverse, and if you pick a shade, you’re likely to find it somewhere. But despite the resigned belief that ...

After reconstructing the color patterns of a well-preserved dinosaur from China, researchers have found that the long-lost species Psittacosaurus (meaning "parrot lizard," a reference to its ...