Do we really know what color dinosaurs were?

Unknown Brain 1594

did they really exists?

Kathy Ewers New Brain

No, we can only imagine as we did not live during this time.

Storm Knight 1688

baseline answer is that plants are green for the most part. Cyanobacteria are the progenitors of photosynthesis, they are green because of their chlorophyl. Chloroplasts found in plants are enslaved cyanobacteria. This photosystem is the most efficient for high sunlight.. And cyanobacteria predate plants and animals. While other colors work, green is king in photo-energy.
So the world would be green, but the dinosaurs had the same amount of time to evolve as birds, so their coloration would be impressive.. Dinosaurs were mostly tetrachromatic (super color vision),, so matching the color green isnt easy, and probably wasnt a major impact on their coloring. More likely is that they had snake like coloring, where the skin looks unremarkable from a distace.

Darren Rye 2391

we mustn't forget that even today plants can have red leaves and still be fully functioning, i am not sure as to the mechanism of photosynthesis but i think it is to do with a variant of chlorphyll which reflects red rather than green.

also the t-rex example is an odd one, as it has been hypothesised that it was a bully, and simply stole food from smaller animals who hunted in packs to bring down large prey, so they may have been any number of garish colours.

colours are used in so many ways in the animal kingdom that it is impossible to conclude anything unless evidence is found, speculation just brings up images that we have seen before...again built on speculation

Tyler Probst New Brain

Short answer, no.

Rob Kalwarowsky New Brain

You would have to think about the composition of the atmosphere in the time of the dinosaurs. The only reason plants are green is because of photosynthesis (actually chlorophyll which is part of photosynthesis). If the atmosphere was composed of carbon dioxide then the plants could do photosynthesis (and they would produce oxygen) and they would be green. Otherwise they might have been a different color. Hope this helps.

Unknown Brain 1908

There is very little evidence of what colour dinosaurs were. Most that you see is conjecture, some based on fact, others based on aesthetics, or what the public would find pleasing .

However, some evidence of dinosaur colour has recently been found:

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-12/04/content_7195910.htm

There is a National Geographic special on this subject:

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/dinosaurs/dino-mummies.html

They show a computerised reconstruction of the Hadrosaur that was found. It is interesting to see what they conceived of as a Hadrosaur prior to the find, and what the model looks like once the dinosaur mummy has been scanned.

Alex Gordon New Brain

To answer your question the photosynthetic, glucose-sugar producing areas (leaves) of the plant are going to be mostly green due to the fact that photosystem B of the chloroplast absorbs all wavelengths of light except for green which is reflected back which gives the green apearnce. That is of course if you were asking about the leaves, but if you were wondering about the flowers of angiosperms then the plants would be any vibrant attractive color so that it would lure pollinating organisms to spread the pollen to other flowers in order to create gentetic diverstiy in the population. Any other specific organ or part of the plant could be any color within reason, and is best to look back on the evolutionary history of the species.

The color of dinosaurs can only be discovered in a few ways because the true color can not be determined based on bones. One way to discover there color would be to discover a preserved dinosaur in an ice glacier and simply view the skin, the other way would be the popularized sci-fi way of extracting the DNA from an organism stuck in amber (Jurrasic Park), after sequencing the DNA and mapping the species genome (alot harder then it sounds) you could determine the color. Even though it sounds crazy its actually very possible.

A reason they would give the picture army camoflauge is because it would seem logical to give a predator camoflauge but actually a T-rex is so big that it wouldn't probably use stealth to hunt but it was actually a fast runner and would run down its prey and use its massive jaws to rip the prey apart. your picture was just that...a picture and they either colored it that way to get it to look cool or they had no idea what they were talking about. But with differnt dinosaurs the possibilities are endless it just depends on their circumstances.

Peter Yohe 1283

We don't really know what the atmosphere or living conditions were like--We have some clues, though, found in fossils,and in evolutionary evidence. I think that dinosaurs were probably colored more like crocodiles, or monitor lizards for the sake of camoflage.

Betty Vice 1317

Well, the oxygen content in our atmosphere accounts for many colors. Some planets have red or orange skies instead of blue. If you believe in evolution, they hold that oxygen wasn't introduced into our system in such high contents until after the comet. So, thats for the plant life at least.

I think most dinosaurs probably were camo or of colors that would easily blend in anywhere in their environment.