Illustration of arboroharamiya fuscus, a newly discovered Jura mammal species with dark fur
Chuang Zhao, Ruoshuang Li
While many dinosaurs and pterosaurs flaumed flamboyant feathers were early mammals a dull lot. A study of the fossilized coat of six mammals that lived Jurassic and Creataceous periods have found that they all had gray -brown fur.
“They were dinosaur food,” says Matthew Shawkey at Ghent University in Belgium. “You wouldn’t be conspicuous.”
Working on how animals that lived in the distant past seemed to be thought impossible. But since the 1990s, thousands of fossils with feathers and fur have been discovered.
In some boxes, traces of melanosomes – cell organs containing the pigment melanin – can be when these fossils are examined under a microscope.
Melanin is found in two variants-black-brown and yellow-red and mold of melanosomes varies depending on their composition. So to know the shape of melanosomes in fur or feathers give you a good idea of ​​their color.
Shawkey’s team started by looking at the melanosomes in the fur in another interval from 116 living mammals. From this development the development of a model that predicts fur color based on melanosome form and the use of this to six fossils of different mammals.
All six fossils came from the same deposits in China, but the species lived at different times ranging from Middle Jurassic to the early chalk, about 165 million to 120 million years ago. One of them was a newly described sliding mammal by name Arboroharamiya fuscus It lived the surroundings 159 million years ago.
Given that these mammals are all believed to have been nocturnal, it is no surprise that they were all pretty common.
“We expected them to have muted colors,” says Shawkey. “The one thing I was surprised was how indispensable they were.
The team plans to expand its study by looking at further early mammal fossil from other places in the world, but Shawkey does not expect the results to be very different. It was only after the eradication of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago that many mammals became active per day, and that’s probably when their colors became more different, he says.
Some fossils of dinosaurs and marine reptiles included preserved skin, but there have been feumps to find out their skin color from fossils.
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