Illustration of Arboroharamya Fuscus, newly discovered species of Jurassic mammals with dark fur
Chuang Zhao, Ruoshuang Li
While many dinosaurs and pterosaurs had extravagant feathers, early mammals were boring. Study of fossiled fur of six mammals, which lived during Jurassic and chalk periods, showed that everybody has grayish-brown fur.
“They were food of dinosaurs,” he says Matthew Shawkey at the GAMA of the University of Belgium. “You didn’t want to be visible.”
Looking on what animals lived in the distant past looked like to be unimaginable. But since the Nineteen Nineties, 1000’s of fossils with feathers and fur have been discovered.
In some cases, traces of melanosomes – cell organelles containing pigment melanin – may be seen when fossils are tested under a microscope.
Melanin occurs in two variants-yellow and yellow red-a-a-a-a-a-y shape of melanosomes varies depending on their composition. Knowledge of the shape of melanosomes in fur or feathers gives an excellent idea of their color.
The Shawkey team began taking a look at the melanosomes in a fur of a various range of 116 live mammals. From this, scientists have developed a model that predicts the color of the furs based on the shape of melanosome and used it to 6 fossils of various early mammals.
All six fossils got here from the same deposits in China, but the species lived at different times, from the middle Jurassic to early chalk, about 165 million to 120 million years ago. One of them was the newly described mammal called, which lived about 159 million years ago.
Given that these mammals are considered night, no wonder they were all slightly easy.
“We expected that they would have quite subdued colors,” says Shawkey. “One thing I was surprised is how unchanging they were. The colors were even more similar than I would predict. “
The team plans to expand their study, taking a look at the additional early mammal fossils from other places in the world, but Shawkey doesn’t expect the results to be different. He says that only after the Dinosaurs were extinct 66 million years many mammals became lively and doubtless their colours became more diverse.
Some fossils of dinosaurs and sea reptiles include preserved skin, but little attempts to develop skin color from fossils.
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