2020-03-18 09:35:18
Ten years ago, in 2010, the first study, based on physical evidence, describing the coloration of various dinosaur species was published. One of those dinosaurs was Sinosauropteryx. Some fossils of this dinosaur show alternating light and dark stripes on the tail. Although at first this alternation was interpreted as an artifact produced by separating the mold from the counter-mold of the rock that contained the fossil, as early as 2002, the British paleontologist Nicholas Longrich suggested that the bands were too regular, and that they could correspond to the preservation of different pigments from the animal’s feathers.
The 2010 study, conducted by a group of scientists from China, the United Kingdom and Ireland, found in the fossils remains of melanosomes, the cellular organelles that give feathers their color in modern birds. In modern birds it is observed that the structure of melanosomes is related to their color; This is how it can be known, if that structure has been preserved in fossils, the coloration of extinct animals. In this way, the study confirmed that the color differences between the light and dark rings on the tail of Sinosauropteryx were real, and determined that the dark areas were chestnut or reddish-brown. Subsequent research has revealed a general pattern of countershading in the plumage of Sinosauropteryx, with darker upperparts and lighter underparts, and a raccoon-like mask to the eyes.
Sinosauropteryx lived in northeast China in the Lower Cretaceous, about 123 million years ago. There it lived with many other species of dinosaurs and mammals, some of which have already appeared in Fossil Zoo, such as the venomous dinosaur Sinornithosaurus, the feathered Tyrannosaurus Yutyrannus, and the predatory mammal Repenomamus. Although plant fossils indicate that the region, then volcanic and dotted with lakes, was once covered in forests, Sinosauropteryx’s countershading is more useful for camouflage in open areas where direct light is received from above. It is likely that those forests alternated with more or less extensive grasslands or savannahs, which would be the preferred environment for Sinosauropteryx to hide from large predators.
Sinosauropteryx is a small theropod, a bipedal predatory dinosaur measuring one meter in length and half a kilo in weight. Its skull is long and narrow. The front teeth are finer than the rear teeth, which are also laterally compressed and serrated. The neck is curved upwards so that the head is higher than the body. The arms are short, but the hands are large, with three fingers. The first finger is longer and thicker. The second ends in a claw so large that the finger and claw combination is longer than the forearm. The tail, with 64 vertebrae, is the longest among theropod dinosaurs in relation to body size. In one of the fossil specimens there is a pigmented region on the abdomen that has been interpreted as traces of the internal organs. Dark pigments have also been found in the eye region of another specimen.
Sinosauropteryx is covered in a dense layer of short, very simple filamentous feathers, which in fossils appear farther apart from the bones in areas where more muscle tissue is expected to be present, such as on the back, and closer together on the head and on the back. the end of the tail. This confirms that they are feathers and not internal anatomical structures. Its length also varies, from thirteen millimeters in the feathers that surround the eyes to 35 millimeters in the shoulders and four centimeters in the middle of the tail.
A fossil specimen preserves the remains of a lizard in its abdomen. It is a running lizard of the genus Dalinghosaurus. Small, fast animals like this were part of the Sinosauropteryx diet. In another fossil, three jaws have been found, which have been identified as belonging to Zhangheotherium, a climbing mammal about 16 centimeters long, including the tail, endowed with a spur, possibly poisonous, like the platypus; and Sinobaatar, a 35-centimeter-long herbivorous mammal.
The same specimen that the lizard ate has several eggs in its abdomen. Since the shells are intact, it is not likely that he ate them as well, but they must be his own eggs, so the individual was a female. Two of the eggs are in front of the end of the pubis, ready to lay, indicating that these dinosaurs, like many others, laid their eggs in pairs. Each egg measures 36 millimeters long and 26 wide.
Sinosauropteryx belongs to the family Compsognathids, which lived between the Upper Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous in Eurasia and South America. This family is not closely related to birds; there are many other families of theropods closer to them, so it is very likely that most theropod dinosaurs had feathers.
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