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You've seen many pictures of dinosaurs, in books and magazines. You've seen them on TV, and in movies. But you really haven't learned much about what dinosaurs actually looked like! We know how big they were, and what their shape was; scientists have been finding their bones, skulls, and even complete skeletons, for many hundreds of years. We can use these bones to deduce many things about how dinosaurs lived: what they ate, how fast they could run, how and where they laid their eggs ... But we've never been able to discover what colour they were, or what the texture of their skin was, because skin does not survive very well over tens of millions of years, like bones do. All the dinosaurs you've seen in pictures and movies have been coloured and textured according to the artist's imagination; we really had no idea what colour their skin was, nor what kind of texture it had! Some scientists assumed that dinosaur skin resembled crocodile or alligator skin, since these modern reptiles have existed virtually unchanged since the age of the dinosaurs. They pictured dinosaur skin as dark green or brown, and smooth, with bumps. Sort of like leather. Recently, some scientists have come up with a new theory. Because tens of millions of years ago there were many types of dinosaurs, all in competition with each other for food, these scientists surmise that dinosaurs would have exhibited a great range in colour, just as modern lizards do. They theorize that dinosaurs came in a rainbow of colours; some green, some red, some with brightly coloured stripes! At this point, there is no way to decide who is right. There are only a very few dinosaur skin 'samples' that have been found, and these aren't really skin at all, but fossils of skin; imprints made by the skin of the dying dinosaur in mud, which later turned to stone. We can't tell the colour of the original skin from a fossil imprint! But wait ... a recently discovered fossil skin sample from a duck-billed dinosaur, while not showing any colour, definitely does show a texture. And it's not at all what we imagined!  Skin imprint from a duck-billed dinosaur This skin is definitely warty! Seen here as an imprint, you can visualize it as being covered by many rough, dime-sized, rugged protuberances. It is thought that these jagged bumps on its skin, by increasing its surface area, helped the dinosaur to stay cool. How did this fossil skin come to be? Well, the bones of the duck-bill were found with it, buried in rock that at one time was silt at the bottom of a lake ... perfect for making an impression, but at the same time preventing the skin from rotting away! So now we have some idea of what at least one dinosaur's skin looked like. The duck-bill was a common dinosaur; it's likely that many dinosaurs shared this feature. Dinosaurs' skin wasn't smooth and leathery, but rough and jagged! Now if we only knew what shade of blue they were ... |