Dinosaur age fossils colour discovery

This November 2018 video says about itself:

Check out the Most AMAZING Fossil Discoveries Ever! This top 10 list of mysterious archaeological discoveries has some of the strangest and most incredible prehistoric animal bones ever found!

10. Patagotitan
In 2012, a farmer came across a stone littered with the remains of all kinds of dinosaurs. Some of the fossilized bones in particular, were determined to belong to a massive herbivore. This new species is arguably the most massive dinosaur ever discovered!! Now known as the Patagotitan mayorum, this titanosaur was 122 feet (37 m) long, nearly 20 feet high (6 m) at the shoulder, and weighed over 70 tons.

9. Megalosaurus
The Megalosaurus was found in England in 1676, where a fragmentary bone was discovered in a limestone quarry in Oxfordshire. This find was one of the first dinosaurs ever discovered!! The first scientists to examine the bone thought it might have come from a Roman war elephant, or even from a giant human like those mentioned in the Bible. The fragment was the end of a femur, but because of its shape, it was labeled “Scrotum humanum”. The name stuck until 1827, when it was given its proper name.

8. Tyrannosaurus rex
What listing of huge fossils would be complete without the king of the dinosaurs? It was one of the largest predators ever, with just its skull measuring over five feet long! It’s estimated that T. rex had the greatest bite force in history, at about 8000 pounds of pressure – about the weight of three small cars! Now scientists believe that adult t-rexes could have been covered in feathers.

7. Giganotosaurus
Its name is often mispronounced as “giganto-saurus,” a name that would be appropriate for its immense size, but that’s actually the name of another dinosaur. Giganotosaurus’ name is really Greek for “great Southern lizard”. Found in Argentina, this beast lived during the Late Cretaceous period, about 97 million years ago. It was larger than a T-rex, estimated to be about 45 feet long (13.7 m) and tipping the scales at 15 tons. That’s a several tons heavier and five feet longer than T. rex!

6. Archaeopteryx
The Archaeopteryx is a transitional species between dinosaurs and birds. It is often considered the first bird. This remarkable creature was first found in southern Germany in 1860. It’s not very large – only about the size of a raven – but the quality that makes it “big” is its plumage. Like birds, the Archaeopteryx had flight feathers, and these have been beautifully preserved in the fossil record. In fact, eleven separate specimens have been discovered, all of them with their feathers clearly shown.

5. Diplodocus
First discovered in 1877 in Colorado, Diplodocus was a four-footed, herbivorous giant. It lived in North America during the Jurassic period, about 155 million years ago. A long-necked, long-tailed creature, the Diplodocus measured about 108 feet (33 m) long and weighed about 17.6 tons (10 to 16 metric tons).

4. Mosasaurus
Massive monsters weren’t exclusively found on land. These ancient marine reptiles were not dinosaurs and are believed to be one of the most fearsome predators to live in the ocean. The Mosasaurus could reach lengths of up to 56 feet (17 m) and weigh up to 30,000 pounds (13,607 kg). Paleontologists think that Mosasaurus had tail flukes similar to sharks, and like sharks, it probably could cruise along at a pretty fast speed!

3. Iguanodon
The Iguanodon, was a four-legged herbivore that lived during the Jurassic period to the Cretaceous. When a fossil was first obtained by an English doctor in 1825, it was just a gigantic tooth that the doctor called “Iguanodon”, meaning “iguana tooth”. Over the years many different dinosaurs were labelled as iguanodons so it got kind of confusing and it was hard to find big skeletons and artists started to create their own beasts based on bits and pieces of information.

2. Hadrosaurus
Their name translates to “bulky lizard”, but we know them better as duck-billed dinosaurs. These creatures were the most common dinosaurs, found all across Europe, North America and Asia during the late Cretaceous period about 80 million years ago. Hadrosaurs were herbivores, and they probably lived near water. They ran on two legs and had a stiff tail that helped them balance.

1. Yutyrannus
This dinosaur was a distant cousin of the T-Rex and lived in the Cretaceous period. Discovered in northeastern China, these guys were big, scary, and fluffy!!

A December 2017 video from Canada used to say about itself:

Science Breakthroughs — World’s Best Dinosaur Fossil (2017)

Known as a Nodosaur, this 110 million-year-old, armored plant-eater is an exquisitely preserved fossil—and surprisingly statuesque. It was discovered by a miner in 2011 and publicly unveiled on May 12, 2017.

This is an extraordinary new discovery of a dinosaur fossil so pristine and complete, that it shows off the texture, patterns, and color of a prehistoric giant. Discover this brand new species that roamed during the late Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. The Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta has spent five years and over 7,000 hours preparing the fossil for research and display.

From AFP news agency:

Traces of pigment on dinosaur fossils a first clue to their skin colour

Traces of pigment in reptile fossils may lead to recreations of how extinct beasts looked

Sunday, 12 January, 2014, 3:36am

What did Tyrannosaurus rex really look like?

Depending on which artist’s impression you look at, the carnivorous king of the Cretaceous was a dull grey, an earthy brown, or maybe a dark green.

But now, new insights into prehistoric fossils, published last week, may one day help determine what the great dinosaurs looked like in real life.

Scientists have uncovered the first traces of pigment in reptile fossils – a dark hue found in three extinct deep-sea beasts distantly related to today’s leatherback turtle.

“This is the first time that… remains of original pigments have been detected in any (extinct) reptile, including dinosaurs,” Johan Lindgren of Sweden’s Lund University said.

The next challenge will be to identify more pigments, helping palaeontologists to reconstruct the colouring of extinct animals.

“This finding potentially allows us to reconstruct the colours of T. rex in future,” said Lindgren, though for now experts are limited to distinguishing dark areas from light ones.

Lindgren and colleagues studied molecular remains found on the skin of three marine monsters. The samples came from a forerunner 55 million years ago of the leatherback turtle; a giant, finned lizard known as a mosasaur dated to 86 million years ago; and a toothy dolphin-like reptile called an ichthyosaur, around 190 million years old.

The remains took the form of structures a micrometre (a millionth of a metre) in size that, according to previous studies, were either pigment traces or the vestiges of bacteria.

The new investigation claims to have settled that debate with in-depth microscopic analysis – revealing the remains to be traces of the most common skin pigment, melanin.

Colouration in animals serves multiple purposes – from camouflage or sexual display to UV protection and heat retention. Little is known about the colouring of long-extinct animals, given that pigmentation is carried in quickly decaying skin. But sometimes, as in this case, scientists are lucky to find soft tissue preserved as an “organic film”.

The team pointed out there was a close correlation between the amount of melanin in skin and how dark the skin’s colour is.

The fossil tissue of all three extinct sea beasts contained very tightly packed pigment granules. This led the scientists to conclude the creatures had “an overall dark colouration” similar to that of the modern leatherback turtle, whose top is almost entirely black, said Lindgren.