Pretty Dinosaur

(Via the Wicked Thoughts blog - which is still pretty good, but more and more racist as time goes by)

Pretty animals! I wonder if they're good at laying eggs?:

Scientists have mapped out the full colour pattern for a feathered dinosaur for the first time. They found that the species in question looked something like a Spangled Hamburg chicken.

By analysing fossilised pigments, called melanosomes, the team were able to assign colours to individual feathers of Anchiornis huxleyi, a four-winged carnivore dinosaur that lived during the late Jurassic period in China.

The dinosaur, which was alive about 47 million years ago, had a largely grey body, a reddish-brown, Mohawk-like crest and facial speckles, and white feathers on its wings and legs, with bold black-spangled tips.