<div id="subtitle">Yipes, feathered dinosaur sported stripes, Mohawk-style crest, new report says</div><div><p>Some dinosaurs had russet-colored feathers, and one jazzy specimen had a Mohawk crest and stripes, researchers say in the first reports to confidently assign colors to dinosaurs.</p><p>Their colors have long been a subject of speculation among researchers and schoolchildren.</p><p>In the new study, reported in Thursday's online edition of the journal Science, scientists focused on melanosomes, which impart color.</p><p>They were able to assign color to individual feathers and thus work out color patterns for the entire fossil of Anchiornis huxleyi, a small, feathered, two-legged dinosaur that lived roughly 150 million years ago.</p><p>The animal would have weighed about four ounces (110 grams) and appears to have had a dark gray or black body and wings with some white feathers that gave it a stripe pattern, plus a reddish-brown crest and speckles on the face.</p><p>"This was no crow or sparrow, but a creature with a very notable plumage," said Richard O. Prum, professor of ornithology at Yale University and a co-author of the study.</p><p>"This would be a very striking animal if it was alive today," Prum said in a statement.</p><p>The specimen they studied was found in China, which was also the home 125 million years ago of Sinosauropteryx, a creature that seems to have had russet-colored feathers, according to a paper published last week in the journal Nature.</p><p>Prum speculated that the color pattern of A. huxleyi could have served as a signal to attract mates.</p><p>Co-author Julia Clarke, an associate professor of paleontology at the University of Texas at Austin, suggested that color patterns for camouflage or display must have had a key role in the early evolution of feathers in dinosaurs.</p><p>The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, University of Akron, the National Geographic Society and Yale University.</p><p>___</p><p>On the Net:</p><p>Science: http://www.sciencemag.org</p><p>National Geographic:</p><p>http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/02/100204-dinosaurs-color-feathers-science-3-d-picture/</p><img src="http://admatch-syndication.mochila.com/images/ad.gif?aid=68467438&bid=informcom" /></div><div id="copyright"><div>

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