So has this changed the way that artists are painting their reconstructions? I mean you often see some dinosaurs, you’ve got a very good idea exactly what they looked like? 

 

Yes, it is changing the way people view them. If we have a look at these paintings of Sinosauropteryx which is one of the lovely little dinosaurs. This was probably done five or six years ago, it looks a bit odd. I mean they’ve got the textures of the feathers. That's more or less what we would believe from the fossil. But they made it a strange sea-green kind of colour. A few years later, the same artists are able to have used a picture like this which shows the same dinosaur but with a very definite ginger, white, ginger, white, sort of barber’s-pole stripe on the tail.

 

So this is based on your analysis of colour of this particular dinosaur.

 

Yes. Yes. Of this particular dinosaur. We took samples from the dark stripes. And we can say these dark stripes were not red or black or whatever. They were ginger.

 

Right. That's just amazing. So this is more than just being able to put a little bit of colour on your illustration. It's actually telling you something quite important about dinosaurs.

 

Yes, it may say something about behaviour which we wouldn't have thought, we could never get to. If they are coloured, and if they are striped and patterned, there must be some visual purpose, signaling of some kind, camouflage or sexual display or warning thing, you know, ‘I have a flash of colour, don't mess with me’, you know. So there are all sorts of reasons they may have had those colours.

 

These new discoveries really do bring dinosaurs right out of the realm of the mythical and the fantastical. They are not imagined creatures at all. They are real. And with some of them when we have all this information, we can look at a reconstruction and know that that is a life-like representation of that animal, from the size and shape of its body to the way it holds itself, the way it moves down to it colour, all of that is rooted in science.