Fossilised feathers may reveal their colour

by Rich Bowden - Jul 9 2008, 01:08

A team of researchers has revealed that preserved organic material found on fossilised feathers are the remains of pigments which gave the feathers their original colour.

A team from Yale University found the material in the 100 million-year-old feathers, previously thought to be preserved bacteria, were similar to those found in modern birds. The researchers concluded they are fossilized melanosomes, the organelles that contain melanin pigment.

"Birds frequently have spectacularly colored plumage which are often used in camouflage and courtship display," said Yale PhD student Jakob Vinther. "Feather melanin is responsible for rusty-red to jet-black colors and a regular ordering of melanin even produces glossy iridescence. Understanding these organic remains in fossil feathers also demonstrates that melanin can resist decay for millions of years."

Working with Yale colleagues Derek E. G. Briggs and Richard O. Prum, Vinther analysed fossil feathers found in Brazil and compared them to the feathers of modern day birds.

"Now that we have demonstrated that melanin can be preserved in fossils, scientists have a way to reliably predict, for example, the original colors of feathered dinosaurs," said Prum, who is the William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology and chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, as well as curator of ornithology at Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History.

Commenting on the find to the BBC, Dr Mike Benton of the University of Bristol said it resolves a mystery.

"The banding looks so life-like that it can't be geological in origin - it has to be biological," he said."There are particular cells that cluster into the dark areas of modern birds calledmelanosomes," explained Dr Benton.

"Somehow [the melanosomes] are retained and replaced during the preservation process and hence you preserve a very life like representation of the colour banding [in the fossils]."

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