A thing of beauty is a joy forever – but the true colours of the vanished creatures in the fossil record have mostly faded away. Evidence like the vibrant iridescent blue of this 49-million-year-old fossilised weevil are rarely preserved, so palaeontologists have to guess what prehistoric animals may have looked like.
Researchers are trying to reverse-engineer the processes that cause fossils to lose their colours by putting modern insects and feathers through the rigours of fossilisation. They apply extremes of temperature and pressure and expose samples to chemicals to see how they affect their colour. This allows them to infer the original appearance of primeval beasts.
You can see the results for yourself at the Royal Society's Summer Science Exhibition in London, starting tomorrow. Researchers will be on hand to demonstrate what remnants of fossil colours look like under an electron microscope. Embedded within the feathers of long-extinct birds, you'll be able to spot melanosomes – tiny bags of the pigment melanin that colour the feathers and fur of many living birds and mammals.
If you can't make it to London, the team has created an online game to help explain, in the form of a jumping zombie beetles navigating lava jets, how fossils lose their colour.
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