How to Build a Dinosaur Page #7

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- to experiment with colours, maybe in the face or the throat?

- Yeah...

I still think that overall we want to stick to standard grey,

green, brown.

I think that it will be nice to be subtle,

but something that can be...

can be viewed when you're looking at it from,

you know, six feet away.

Although the colour of fruitadens is unknown,

new scientific breakthroughs

are allowing palaeontologists to see some

dinosaurs in a way

that's never been possible before.

We're still learning more about dinosaurs

as increasing numbers of specimens come to light,

but also as the techniques that we use

to analyse them

become more and more sophisticated.

And I'm off to meet somebody now

who's made great discoveries

in one particular aspect of dinosaur science

that many people thought would remain hidden for ever.

Here's another one we're going to look at.

I'll just put it in.

It will take a minute or two to fire up the vacuum.

'Professor Mike Benton recently came across

'the remains of a dinosaur that was

so exquisitely well preserved

'that feathers, as well as bones,

had fossilised.

'Incredibly, those feathers can tell us

the colour of a dinosaur

'that lived 125 million years ago.'

Going back, say, ten years ago, would you ever

have imagined that you would have been able

to tell what colour any dinosaurs would have been?

No. I mean, I think at that time I,

and everybody else,

would have said that is one of the things

we'll never know.

And so if we just focus up,

see what we've got here.

'Using a scanning electron microscope,

Mike can find clues

'about the pigmentation of these ancient fossil feathers.'

If we have a look at this...

- We're at quite high magnification - that's 9,000 times.

- Right.

All of these sausage shapes, then,

are melanosomes,

and in a living feather they would be full

of the chemical melanin,

which, in fact, gives the colour.

And these sausage-shaped ones

are a sure indicator of a particular kind of melanin,

which is the one that gives a black or dark

brown colour.

So, in some cases like this,

the field of view is completely packed

with the sausage-shaped ones,

so we know this must have been intensely black.

If they were more loosely spaced,

we'd know it was a paler colour,

maybe dark brown, or grey.

Right. So, is it just really the presence or absence

of the black pigments that you're able to ascertain?

The wonderful thing is that there's another form

of melanin that gives a ginger colour.

And it is packaged in a different shape of melanosome,

not this kind of cigar-shaped,

or sausage-shaped one,

but a spherical one, a little ball.

Close it up, get the vacuum going.

'A sample from a different fossil shows

what the structures that carry this ginger pigment look like.'

Oh, that's entirely different.

This surface looks as though you've taken a melon baller

and scooped out lots of little spherical hollows.

So, what colour would these

melanosomes have made?

This is definitely ginger.

If you look at a ginger hair from a mammal

or a human being, that's what you'd see also.

So, is it relatively easy to compare

your dinosaur feathers

with what's already known about

the feathers of living birds,

to get that comparison, to know what colours

you were looking at here?

We can put the specimens in one after the other.

There's the modern one, there's the fossil.

Spot the difference. No difference at all.

And who on earth would have thought a dinosaur

is close to a bird?

But there we are, it's kind of proved in the skeletons

and now, if you like, proved in the anatomy

of the feathers.

'For those few dinosaurs from whom

fossilised feathers have been found,

'largely in China,

'we can now put the finishing touches

to a reconstruction.'

Has this changed the way

that artists are painting their reconstructions, then?

We've got some dinosaurs

where you've got a very good idea exactly

what they look like.

Yes, it is changing the way people view them.

If we have a look at these paintings

of sinosauropteryx,

which is one of the lovely little dinosaurs,

this was probably done five or six years ago.

It looks a bit odd. They've got the texture

of the feathers

and that's more or less what we would believe

from the fossil,

but they've made it a strange sea green

kind of colour.

A few years later, the same artists

are able to produce

a picture like this, which shows the same dinosaur,

but with a very definite

ginger, white, ginger,

white sort of barber's pole stripe on the tail.

- So, this is based on your analysis of colour in

this particular dinosaur?

- Yes. Yes.

Of this particular dinosaur we took samples

from the dark stripes

and we can say these dark stripes

were not red or black or whatever

- they were ginger.

Right. That's just amazing.

So, this is more than just being able

to put a bit of colour

on your illustrations -

it's actually telling you something quite

important about dinosaurs?

Yes. It may say something about behaviour,

which we wouldn't have thought we could ever get to.

If they are coloured, and if they are striped

and patterned,

- there must be some visual purpose,

signalling of some kind.

- Yeah, yeah.

Camouflage, or sexual display,

or a warning thing -

you know, "I've got a flash of colour,

don't mess with me", you know.

So, there's all sorts of reasons they may have

had those colours.

These new discoveries really do bring dinosaurs

right out of the realm of the mythical and the fantastical.

They're not imagined creatures at all,

they are real.

And with some of them,

when we have all this information,

we can look at a reconstruction and know that

that is a lifelike representation of that animal,

from the size and shape of its body

to the way it holds itself, the way it moves,

down to its colour.

All of that is rooted in science.

Back in Los Angeles, last-minute preparations are under way to get the dinosaurs ready for the public.

It's only now that you get a sense of just

how many people have been involved

in creating this exhibition, from the artists,

to the designers,

to the teams that made the interactive media

and the mounts for the dinosaurs,

all of it bringing to life the decades of research

our current scientific understanding relies on.

CHEERING:

The exhibition consists of over 300 specimens.

It's taken more than six years to complete

and cost tens of millions of dollars.

We've created an exhibit

that this part of the world has never seen.

And it's very rewarding for me to think about

the millions of kids

and the millions of people that during the next 20 years

will visit this exhibit

and will remember this exhibit for the rest of their lives.

These animals look like something out of a comic book,

or a Hollywood studio, but they were real.

From a pile of dusty bones millions of years old,

we can put a skeleton back together,

flesh it out, tell what colour these creatures were,

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