London, July 9 : Palaeobiologists have found that 100-million-year-old fossilized bird feathers preserve microscopic colour-containing pouches, which when decoded, could reveal realistic colour patterns of the dinosaurs.
According to a report in New Scientist, Jakob Vinther, and colleagues Derek Briggs and Richard Prum, from Yale University in the UK, fired electron beams onto an unidentified bird feather fossil from Brazil to reveal precisely-arranged packets that colour plumage brown, black and grey.
“They look like small sausages, they’re elongated and rounded at the edges,” said Vinther. “We are quite confident that they aren’t bacteria,” he added.
The packets resemble similar structures on modern birds.