DINOSAUR SKIN

Eric the dismissed said...

Jim- I just got finished watching Jurassic Park and I came up with a question that you might be able to answer: If we don't find frozen specimens, how can we tell from fossilized bones whether an extinct animal had hair or not? Could a dinosaur have had hair?



Well, Eric, amazingly enough, fossils of dinosaur skin have been found. Apparently, not many, but enough that we can be pretty sure they didn't have hair. Although we may never know the color of dinosaurs, the texture of dinosaur skin is another matter. Natural cast fossils of dinosaur skin have been discovered that show clearly what the skin of various dinosaurs looked and felt like. The debate amongst paleontologists was whether dinosaurs had scales or not. Fossils show there were both. Most skin fossils show bumpy skin, not scaly skin; only the huge plant-eaters seem to have had scaly skin. Some of the birdlike dinosaurs had protofeathers (a type of modified scale).