The color of the dinosaurs

One of the innovations paleontológicas more interesting than last years has been, at least for me, the assertion of that many dinosaurs had pens, including some abductors (remember Jurassic Park). There are pens of diverse type, from "protoplumas" filamentosas, not branched out, up to complex pens very similar to those of the current birds.
The first ones with protoplumas were described in 1996 (prime Sinosauropteryx) and since then they have not stopped appearing, including any groups of distant dinosaurs to the birds. I recommend for that he wants to know more of this to him the marvelous blog of the Paleofreak (he looks for "pens" and a fair amount of material appears). The innovation in the last weeks has been that it was possible to have deduced the color of some of them. How is this possible if some rest of pigment does not stay in the fossilization?
The key word is "melanosoma", a cellular orgánulo that contains melanin, the most common pigment in the skin, hair and eyes of the animals. It turns out that in very favorable fossilization conditions the structure of the melanosomas of the dinosaurs one can preserve it sufficiently well how to be analyzed by means of the electronic microscope. Since the melanosomas are present in the pens of the current birds and that his structure changes with the color that they represent, be necessary to compare them morphologically and to deduce the aspect of say to us of more than 100 million years ago.
This discovery owed to the sagacity of Jakob Vinther, who realized that the structures that were observed were not bacteria, as he had proposed up to this moment, but another very different thing. Vinther applied his intuition to fossil pens not "dinosáuricas" in a work of the titled year 2008 The color of fossil feathers (free access) to which the due publicity was not given. The later works could be done thanks to the exceptional conditions of conservation of some deposits like those of Liaoning, where there have been discovered hundreds of fossils of all kinds, many of them of more or less adorned with feathers dinosaurs.
The first results were published in Nature 10 days ago with the title Fossilized melanosomes and the color of Cretaceous dinosaurs and birds. The authors concluded that the tail of the small dinosaur Sinosauropteryx was colored in tones white and chestnut-colored, more or less like that (of what it neither is a tail, it is not even known):
Enlightenment of James Robins
The last news, of only three days ago, refers to Anchiornis huxleyi and they were published under the title Plumage Color Patterns of an Extinct Dinosaur. In this case, although the team is wide, included Vinther, the principal maker seems to have been the paleontologist Julia Clarke, teacher of the University of Texas, that "mapeó" the colors and his distribution in finished dino, of head to tail. This species was of the size of a hen and he lived approximately 155 million years ago. The artistic recreation is like that:
Enlightenment of Michael Digeorgio
In short, some colors of the dinosaurs can, with luck and enough work, be deduced of the morphology of the melanosomas that have survived in cases especially favorable of fossilization. The melanosomas only appear in pens or in protoplumas for what the aspect of the featherless dinosaurs will keep on being a stranger. The open melanosomas show target tones to black and reddish exclusively. I believe that they cannot present any more colors than these scales of gray and yellow to orange - reddish. To find blue, green or colors due to other possible pigments it will be necessary to develop different methods if it was possible.
Personally I believe that it is much more important to have confirmed the pens existence with several forms of transition in his complexity that about being able to decode the colors but it is necessary to admit that it brings the above mentioned over to us much more to the mythical bugs, it is like illuminating a scene that till now was only in half-light.