Pigments have been found in fossil dinosaurs for the first time, a new study says. The discovery may prove once and for all that dinosaurs’ hairlike filaments-sometimes called dino fuzz-are related to bird feathers, paleontologists announced today. (Pictures: Dinosaur True Colors Revealed by Feather Find.) The finding may also open up a new world of prehistoric color, illuminating the role of color in dinosaur behavior and allowing the first accurately colored dinosaur re-creations, according to the study team, led by Fucheng Zhang of China’s Institute for Vertebrate Paleontology. The team identified fossilized melanosomes-pigment-bearing organelles-in the feathers and filament-like structures of fossil birds and dinosaurs from northeastern China. Found in the feathers of living birds, the nano-size packets of pigment-a hundred melanosomes can fit across a human hair-were first reported in fossil bird feathers in 2008. That year, Yale graduate student Jakob Vinther and colleagues, using a scanning electron microscope, discovered melanosomes in the dark bands of a hundred-million-year-old feather. In 2009 Vinther’s group went on to show that another fossilized feather would have been iridescent in a living bird, due to microscopic light-refracting surfaces created by stacked melanosomes. These earlier findings proved it was […]