A team of scientists and researchers shed light on what the world might have looked like during the era of dinosaurs.
Today, many museums house a number of dinosaur fossils like the skeletal frame of a tyrannosaurus rex. Though there is abundant information on the structure of these extinct creatures, there is very little we know about what the world might have looked like at that time.
A team of scientists and researchers solved a part of this problem by studying the fossil of a well-preserved Chinese Psittacosaurusm, a "parrot-lizard" in reference to the structure of its skull.
According to BBC News, the fossil exhibited had a lighter underside than the top. This arrangement is commonly known as counter-shading and it suggests that the extinct animals then lived in an environment of diffused light such as a forest.
Armed with this knowledge, the team collaborated with an artist to create a 3-D model that exhibits the true to life characteristics that they found in the fossil they recovered.
"It was a painstaking process but we now have the best suggestion as to what this dinosaur really looked like," said paleo-artist Bob Nicholls. He further shared that the dinosaur model was "reconstructed inside-out." So far, the model is considered to be the most accurate depiction of a real dinosaur.
Taking it a step further, the team took it upon themselves to learn how shadows affected the form of the animal and how it helped it hide from predators by painting it in a uniform shade of gray.
"This demonstrates that fossil color patterns can provide not only a better picture of what extinct animals looked like, but they can also give new clues about extinct ecologies and habitats," said one of the authors, Jakob Vinther.
The fossil of the dinosaur is part of the Jehol Biota which is comprised of all the living organisms in northeastern China 120 to 133 million years ago.
"Jehol" means a land from a mythical past in Chinese folklore. But with this study, it seems that the land it refers to may not be so mythical after all.
