The people who produce dinosaur illustrations don't seem to have as much of a problem with adding all sorts of details (extravagant plumage, wacky colors/patterns, starry eyes and acrobatic postures) that are neither directly supported nor contradicted by available evidence.

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griffzhowl 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

They only started adding feathers after they found evidence of them being feathered, though.

Plus there's zero direct evidence for their colours so there's no option but to use guesswork in these cases.

And a lot of dinosaur reconstructions may be more for edutainment value rather than reflecting a scholarly best-guess. There's no uniform methodology across all these disciplines.

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bdr 4 days ago | parent [-]

> Plus there's zero direct evidence for their colours

This is no longer true! Starting with Sinosauropteryx in 2010, paleontologists have identified what they believe to be fossilized melanin-containing organelles. These organelles, called melanosomes, have different shapes depending on which color they produce, and those shapes are preserved well enough to be visible under an electron microscope.

	▲	griffzhowl 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Amazing, thanks for pointing it out. In the meantime, there's been some rejigging of the classification so it's this related genus where they've found the melanosomes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huadanosaurus
	▲	sdiupIGPWEfh 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Isn't a rather good deal of color from feathers a result of "structural color", rather than pigmentation? I'd be curious if fossilized feathers could ever, in theory, preserve enough microscopic detail to guess at that.

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RajT88 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

We are not dinosaurs, so have rather less skin in the game when it comes to accuracy.