I’ve seen a bunch of different dinosaur pictures over the years, all of them highly speculative when it comes to colour; the colouration and look of dinosaurs has generally been in the hands of artists, not scientists, because you can’t figure those things out from bones or even skin and feather impressions. But not any more, or at least not for Sinosauropteryx.

Clever, clever  scientists at Bristol University, led by Mike Benton and working with Chinese palaeontologists, have used electron microscopes to find imprints of the melanosomes that carry pigment in hair and feather cells, and by doing so have deduced that Sinosauropteryx – a small theropod in the Compsognathis family, and the earliest dinosaur known to have feathers -  had a “russet” mohawk. (I’m reminded of our old friend Amargasaurus at Melbourne Museum, though its “mohawk” was made of bony spines, not feathers.) Just as importantly, the presence of melanosomes also puts to bed the debate over whether the structures are really feathers: they are.

I wonder now if modern punks will dye their hair in authentic shades from the Cretaceous, or if cosmetics manufacturers will see fit to release “theropod vermillion” rouge or lip gloss? The possibilities are without number…

…and just to prove it, here are a couple of cool dinosaur finds reported in the last week or so.

Tiny Tyrannosaurus – not actually a Tyrannosaurus, of course, since they’re pretty big, but the smallest Tyrannosauroid found so far. At around the height of a human and up to three metres long from head to tail, it’s not really all that tiny, but Raptorex kriegsteini is, as the name suggests, an excellent suggestion of how Tyrannosaurids – with their defining features of tiny arms and massive head – evolved from smaller theropods. As pointed out in the linked article, it’s unlikely to be a direct ancestor of T. rex, but still, it shows us what their ancestor probably looked like, and how they diverged from smaller predators before getting bigger. No transitional fossils my arse, Creationists.

Oh, and Raptorex isn’t just a portmanteau – it means “King of Thieves”. Yes: this is the Autolycus, and thus the Bruce Campbell, of dinosaurs. Kriegstein is the name of the person who donated the fossil, though it’s actually in honour of his father, a Holocaust survivor.

As a side note, check out Raptorex paper author Paul Sereno’s web site. It’s pretty awesome; among other things, he rents out and sells replicas of his fossil finds, and on his postings page you can be disabused of the notion that the scientific community is one big, happy family. This is why is pays to delve into the links given on any science story!)

Earliest feathered dinosaur – Raptorex might have had feathers, but Anchiornis huxleyi is particularly significant because it pre-dates even Archeopteryx, usually acknowledged as the earliest bird. The genus name means “near bird”, but the type species honours Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley. It even had two different kinds of feathers. Dinosaurs are awesome.