Dinosaur colours from 125 million years ago

A meat-eating dinosaur that lived about 125 million years ago was adorned with orange and white rings running along the length of its tail, according to a study that has identified the colour of dinosaurs for the first time.

Fossilised bristles - primitive feathers - on the dinosaur's tail contain microscopic structures or "organelles" that would have contained the pigments which formed the coloured patterns on the tail, scientists have discovered.

The researchers also found evidence of coloration in the fossilised feathers of a bird that lived about the same time as the dinosaur, which had the same kind of pigment-containing structures in its feathers.

Both finds suggest feathers could have arisen as a way of displaying colours rather than as a way of insulating the body against heat loss, or as an aid to the evolution of gliding and powered flight.

Bristol University scientists did the study with Chinese scientists in Beijing from the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology on fossils of the carnivorous therapod dinosaur Sinosautropteryx and the ancient bird Confuciusornis.

The fossils were found in northeastern China.

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