“The sausage-shaped melanosomes produce blacks and browns, the spherical, ball-shaped melanosomes produce reddish, foxy, ginger colours. … Those primitive hair-like structures contain melanosomes, so they're very definitely feathers. They're not just skin fibers. … So Sinosauropteryx was a ginger dinosaur.”

In Our Time (BBC) · Ideas & Essays · November 2026

Context

Asked how scientists can tell what colour dinosaurs were, McNamara explains that the shape of pigment granules preserved in fossil feathers reveals colour, and applies it to the first feathered dinosaur found in China.

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Transcript

In Our Time (BBC) Around 28:30 into the episode

Melvyn Bragg

Maria, because of the plethora of stuff coming from China, mostly and from other places, and because of the massive development in technology, you can even begin to tell what colour the colours that these creatures had. Can you just tell us a bit about that, please?

Speaker 2

Yeah, sure. So, you know, if when you look at the feathers of modern birds, and if you crack them open and put them under a powerful electron microscope, you'll see these tiny

Maria McNamara

…know, several ancient birds and feathered dinosaurs have been studied by researchers, and we've been looking at the record of colour preserved in their feathers using these melanin granules. And what's really remarkable about these melanin granules or melanosomes, as they're called, is that their shape actually varies, and these different-shaped melanosomes can generate different colours. So, the sausage-shaped melanosomes produce blacks and browns, the spherical, ball-shaped melanosomes produce reddish, foxy, ginger colours. And so, for instance, Cynoceropteryx, that first dinosaur that I mentioned that was reported to have feathers, Mike and some colleagues were involved in a study, where they led a study where they showed that Cynoceropteryx, that those primitive hair-like structures contain melanosomes, so they're very definitely feathers. They're not just skin fibers. But, you know, what was really exciting was…

Melvyn Bragg

Can I come to so you discovered the ginger dinosaur? Well, that's something to do, isn't it? I mean, most of us don't get anywhere near. Can you tell us about the Maniraptorans? How they add to the emerging picture? We're still on wings, aren't we? Are we getting towards wings?

Speaker 2

We are indeed. And it seems that two things were happening. As we've mentioned, that mostly in the theropod dinosaurs, they had a trend to large size and shortening the arms. And we think of T-Rex as a kind of end of the story. And every child will tell you that the arms are so short it couldn't…

Melvyn Bragg

Can I come to you then, Steve? As you were researching backwards, what does your present study of birds tell us about where they came from?

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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