Illustration of Arboroharamiya Fuscus, which is the newly discovered Jurassic mammal types with dark furry
Chuang Zhao, Ruoshuang Li
Many dinosaur and pterosaur showed flamboyant feathers, while early mammals were boring lots. A work of the fossilized fur of six mammals living during the periods of Jurassic and Cretaceous found that they were all grayish brown fur.
“It was dinosaur dishes,” he says Matthew Shawkey At the Gent University in Belgium. “You didn’t want to be prominent.”
What were the animals living in the distant past were thought to be. However, thousands of fossils with feathers and fur have been discovered since the 1990s.
In some cases, when these fossils are examined under a microscope, the scars of melanosome – cell organelles containing pigment melanini can be seen.
Melanin in two variants income-black-brown and yellow-red-and the shape of melanosomes varies according to their compositions. Therefore, knowing the shape of melanosomes in fur or feathers gives you a good idea of their colors.
Shawkey’s team began by looking at the melanosomes in the fur of 116 live mammals. Researchers have developed a model that predicts fur color based on melanosomal form and applied it to six fossils of different early mammals.
All six fossils came from the same beds in China, but the species lived at different times from Middle Jurassic to Early Cretaceous, about 165 million to 120 million years ago. One of them was a newly described slip mammal Arborohamiya Fuscus About 159 million years ago.
Considering that all of these mammals are at night, it is not surprising that they are all quite simple.
“We waited for them to have highly repressed colors, Sha said Shawkey. “The only thing I am surprised is how much they are. The colors were more similar than I expected. “
The team plans to expand its work by looking at additional early mammal fossils from other parts of the world, but Shawkey does not expect the results to be very different. Only 66 million years ago, after the disintegration of dinosaurs, many mammals became active during the day, and probably their colors became more diverse.
Some dinosaurs and sea reptiles include the protected skin, but very little attempt to solve the skin color from the fossils.
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