By Susan Milius
It may be time to hatch a new crop of those colorful illustrations of early feathered creatures spreading their wings amid the branches of Late Jurassic trees. In life, a new study suggests, the fossil feather whose discovery gave rise to the name Archaeopteryx more than 150 years ago was actually black.
Longtime celebrities among fossils, Archaeopteryx lithographica specimens have until last year been largely accepted as the most ancient bird species known. Whether or not they end up retaining their claim as early birds, their feathers had small pigment-bearing structures that closely matched those found in today’s birds, Ryan Carney of Brown University in Providence, R.I., and his colleagues report January 24 in Nature Communications.
Archaeopteryx got its name in 1861 based on a lone fossil feather. Modern articles about the creature often show one of the daintily preserved fossils of a spread-out skeleton, but not until 2011 was any skeletal fossil designated as an official example of the species.