Credit: PeerJ (2017). DOI: 10.7717/peerj.3706
Posted on 09/29/2017 11:44:20 AM PDT by fishtank
September 25, 2017 | David F. Coppedge
Original Dinosaur Egg Pigments Found
Add this to your dinosaur soft tissue collection: eggshell pigment proteins that allowed scientists to tell the eggs were blue.
Eggs of an oviraptorid dinosaur found in China are still blue and red from the original pigment. Bob Yirka reports the find in Phys.org:
The team reports that theirs was the first effort to seriously study color in dinosaur eggs. It came about after the team noted some Heyuannia huangi fossilized eggs that had a bluish tint—researchers had previously assumed the tint was due to mineralization, but the new team thought maybe there was more to it. Prior research had shown that Heyuannia huangi were dinosaurs with parrot-like beaks that walked on hind legs. The team used mass spectrometry and chromatographic separation to take a closer look at the eggs and detected traces of biliverdin and protoporphyrin, pigments commonly found in modern colored bird eggs. The eggs were also dated back to the Late Cretaceous period, which ran from 100 to 66 million years ago....
(Excerpt) Read more at crev.info ...
Credit: PeerJ (2017). DOI: 10.7717/peerj.3706
Birds evolved from dinosaurs post.
Was the color camoflage, or did it help the rodent mammals of the day find them? Rats gotta eat, too.
No bacon?
Now, how many Freepers with Little Freepers at home are planing IAW the illustration, blue and red eggs for Easter?
Looks more like blue and pink.
Helping the rats would be proof of intelligent design.
robin eggs are a pale blue
So Dr. Seuss was wrong. They weren’t green eggs.
>>>So Dr. Seuss was wrong. They weren’t green eggs.<<<
That must mean that Dinosaurs tasted like Chicken, not Ham.
No it would not.
Ping.
Reminds me of the dark green color of an emu egg, contrasts with the color of the inner egg shell. Remove the limey whitish accumulations and these might have been just as dark.
Thanks Paladin2. What puzzles me is, since these were dino eggs, why is the coloration called pigment? Shouldn't that be dinoment? /rimshot!
Sadly, these parrot-beaked dinosaurs went extinct because, despite their pleas of "Polly wanna cracker", crackers remained millions of years in the future, and they all starved.
Okay, so, that one doesn't really warrant a rimshot.
A cursory search of academic articles on the preservation of pigments and therefore color finds that it is not at all unknown. “Pigment from fossils reveals color of extinct mammals for the first time, researchers say” is one such article on fossil pigments of 30 million year extinct bats. There are both organic and inorganic pigments. Thus, there is certainly no guarantee the the color will disappear with fossilization.
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