Arboroharamia Fussus depicting a newly discovered Jurassic mammals with dark fur
Chuang Jhao, Rushuang Lee
While many dinosaurs and pterosaurs provoked fiery wings, early mammals were a dull. A study of the fossil fur of six mammals living during Jurassic and Creteseous periods found that they were all brown-brown fur.
“They were dinosaurs,” says Matthew Shoki At the University of Gent in Belgium. “You didn’t want to be specific.”
Animals living in a distant past were considered impossible to work. But since the 1990s, thousands of fossils have been discovered with feathers and fur.
In some cases, melanosome marks – cell organels that contain pigment melanin – can be seen when these fossils are examined under a microscope.
Melanin comes in two variants-black-brown and yellow-red-and melanosome size varies according to their composition. Therefore, knowing the size of melanosome in fur or wings gives you a good idea of their color.
The Shoki’s team began looking at melanosomes in a diverse range of 116 living mammals. From this, researchers developed a model that predicts fur color depending on the melanosome size and applied it to six fossils of various early mammals.
All six fossils came from the same deposits in China, but the species lived at different times from mid -Jurassic to early Creteshius, about 165 million to 120 million years ago. One of them was a newly described gliding mammal name Arboroharamia fussus It lived about 159 million years ago.
Given that these mammals are believed to have all nocturnal, it is no surprise that they were all plain.
“We hoped that they would have a lot of colors,” says Shoki. “One thing that I was surprised is is how irreversible they were. The colors were the same as I would have predicted. ,
The team planned to expand its study by looking at additional early mammals from elsewhere in the world, but the shocki does not expect the results to be very different. They say that many mammals became active during the day only after the extinction of dinosaurs 66 million years ago and probably when their colors became more diverse, they say.
Some fossils of dinosaurs and sea reptiles include protected skin, but some attempts have been made to exclude their skin color from fossils.
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