Scientists have learned more about the ancient animals in the last 25 years than in the previous 250—from the color of their skin and feathers to how they lived and evolved
The deeper paleontologists can look into each new bit of bone, the more they can unravel precious details about the past—and that means they’ve had to seriously scale up their tools.
With great power, though, comes great responsibility. To illustrate the importance of safety to new students, Tafforeau uses an unfiltered beam to light objects on fire and roast coffee beans. “Most of the beams we are using to scan fossils would kill you in just a few seconds,” he says. On the inside, though, the IVPP is more time machine than theme park. Since the 1990s, farmers, researchers, and fossil dealers in northeastern China’s Liaoning Province have brought in hundreds of fossils that have upended our understanding of how dinosaurs looked and behaved. Many preserve traces of feathers that confirm plumage first evolved before dinosaurs ever flew. Some fossils also reveal, in dramatic fashion, that dinosaurs other than birds’ closest ancestors also tried defying gravity.
In a few cases, researchers can even infer some of the animals’ original chemistries. In 2008 scientists led by paleontologist Jakob Vinther, now of the U.K.’s University of Bristol, figured out that melanosomes, tiny subcellular sacs filled with the pigment melanin, could fossilize. The discovery opened the door to a field once thought impossible: figuring out the colors of extinct dinosaurs’ skin and feathers, based on the shapes, sizes, and arrangements of their melanosomes.
At her lab in New Haven, Connecticut, Yale Ph.D. candidate Jasmina Wiemann shows me how she grinds up a small piece ofbone for analysis. She transfers the dust into a tube and invites me to add an acid solution, which fizzes and turns a deep brown. “It reminds me always a little bit of Coca-Cola,” she says. Under a microscope, the gunk left behind includes spongy mahogany chunks shot through with black squiggles. I can’t believe what I’m seeing. The brown schmutz was once protein-rich tissue.
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