For the longest time, we had no idea what color dinosaurs were. We could see their bones. We could study their size, their movement, and how they lived. But their actual appearance—what they looked ...

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 ...

For years, scientists have been left guessing about the true appearance of dinosaurs, particularly when it comes to their skin color. Fossilized skin rarely survives the passage of time, and without ...

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 ...

A study finds that there is a 50 percent chance that the common ancestor of birds and dinosaurs had bright colors on its skin, beaks and scales, but 0 percent chance that it had bright colors on its ...

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 ...

Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The church publishes the ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American The fossil record is always surrounded by ...

woodpecker feather (right side). Under the scanning electron microscope there are melanosomes in the dark but not the light areas of the fossil (far left arrows). The corresponding areas are shown at ...

Fossils can tell us a lot about dinosaurs, but it's a heck of a job to rearrange all the bones to create a structure of a once-living animal. On the other hand, while we can get an idea of how big a ...