In a previous post I wrote about the work of Jakob Vinther at Yale who was studying dinosaur fossils – http://colourware.wordpress.com/2009/08/15/what-colour-were-the-dinosaurs/. This work raised the intriguing possibility that we may be able to work out the colours of dinosaurs based on an analysis of fossil records. Today I read a report that a team of British, Irish and Chinese scientists have done just that – they studied microscopic structures inside the fossilised feathers from a Sinosauropteryx discovered in north-east China and found that the Sinosauropteryx had alternating ginger and white rings down its tail. The work was published in Nature.