Colorful dinosaurs

 

Dinosaurs that we have come to understand through popular media, as also serious literature, is that of dull colors of brown and grey. The pleasant surprise here is that dinosaurs were most certainly tetrachromats, meaning, they were able to see vivid colors that humans could not only not see but cannot even conceive. Humans are trichromats which technically means they have three cones in the eye -that is, color spectrum consist of different combinations of basic colors Blue, Green and Red. Dinosaurs, like birds, have four cones and are able to observe further range of light through UltraViolet. Now if trichromats humans could observe non spectral colors like Purple that doesn’t exist in the rainbow, meaning, it needs more than one wavelength of light to form, imagine with extra cone what kind of vivid colors dinosaurs could have seen hence exhibited. Amazing. All this from an interesting book An Immense World (by Ed Young) I am reading. Strongly recommended.