In the past I’ve tried to stick closely to fly fishing and related topics. This post is a little bit of a stretch. As a father of two young children I still get to think about dinosaurs , and share the enthusiasm that my kids have for them.
So my interest was peaked when I saw the news story that says scientists have solved the age old mystery of What Color Were Dinosaurs? Well – solved for at least one species, the tiny feathered-dinosaur, Anchiornis huxleyi. Check out the story: Prehistoric patterns: A dinosaur gets color from head to feathery tail, in Scientific American Online. Researchers were able to examine fossilized feathers and determine what color they were. And so create a fully-colorized rendering of this 150-million year old creature. It’s pretty cool.
Well, I need to try to make some tie-in to fly fishing so here’s a quote from the article:
“This was no crow or sparrow, but a creature with a very notable plumage,” Richard Prum, a professor of ornithology, ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University, said in a prepared statement. Nevertheless, the coloring isn’t fully unfamiliar. Quite to the contrary, as the authors noted in the study, it is “strikingly similar to various living birds including domesticated fowl.”
This of course makes the fly tyer think “I wonder what dino hackle is like?” I know this fly fishing tie-in is a little weak, but I just thought it was a cool story.
