The crucial black feather (Image: WitmerLab at Ohio University)

Black is always in fashion. The prehistoric bird Archaeopteryx just hit the trend early. In a presentation at the 71st annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Las Vegas, Nevada, last Thursday, Brown University graduate student Ryan Carney offered a first glimpse of the true colour of one the famous creature’s feathers.

For years, palaeontologists have speculated about Archaeopteryx‘s colour scheme, without knowing for sure. Artists have painted it in every shade from tan and rusty brown, to bright greens and blues.

All this speculation could soon end, with new ways to detect prehistoric colours. In 2008 Jakob Vinther, then a graduate student at Yale University, and colleagues discovered the secret by examining microscopic, pigment-creating structures called melanosomes inside a Cretaceous feather from Brazil. The patterns of the tiny features corresponded to those in modern birds, opening the way for studies identifying the colours of dinosaurs.

Last year, for example, Quanguo Li of Beijing’s Museum of Natural History, Vinther, and collaborators painted the full plumage pattern of the feathered dinosaur Anchiornis. A dinosaur very much like Archaeopteryx, Anchiornis was primarily black and white with a splash of red feathers on its head (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1186290).


The subject of Carney’s research was a single – but hugely significant – feather. First described in 1861 by German palaeontologist Hermann von Meyer, it is 150 million years old and the first Archaeopteryx ever to be identified. The discovery of a dinosaur-like skeleton with feather traces from the same deposits soon revealed the magnificent creature the feather came from.

In Las Vegas, Carney reported that the specimen was probably a covert feather &ndash part of the Archaeopteryx wing which would have partly covered the primary feathers used for flight.

As for the colour, Carney and colleagues used scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive X-ray analyses to detect the melanosomes, then compared this data to similar feathers in a database of 87 modern bird species. The feather, he says, was most probably black. While the full colour pattern of Archaeopteryx has yet to be uncovered, Carney noted that melanosomes on the black feather have structural properties which may have strengthened the feathers for the demands of flight. The miniscule structures which hide the secrets of prehistoric colour were not just for show.

Conference references: R. Carney, et al. 2011. Black Feather Colour in Archaeopteryx. 2011 Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Annual Meeting Abstracts, p 84