• Question: what is the most colourful fossel?

    Asked by ramz555 to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 16 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      I don’t know this one. I did see a really interesting talk by a guy that is working out what colour dinosaurs were from their fossils.

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 17 Mar 2012:

      When something becomes a fossil, usually all the soft squishy stuff gets gets decayed away to leave a skeleton, and skeletons aren’t very brightly coloured!

      But some scientists are using fossils with especially good preservation to work out the colour of feathers of birds and dinosaurs (yes, dinosaurs had feathers!), and recently found that one of them was ginger! Most of our reconstructions of extinct creatures just make up the colour though.

      Sometimes fossils can get new colours because of the rocks and minerals they are preserved in. Some of the nicest ones are ammonites from Madagascar that are made of mother-of-pearl and are patchy rainbow coloured!

      http://www.juniorgeo.co.uk/shop/index.php?page_id=2&shop_category_id=3

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 18 Mar 2012:

      I don’t know much about fossils.

Comments