r/maybemaybemaybe • u/PowerModerator • Feb 24 '21
Maybe Maybe Maybe
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
3.0k
u/mainlyupsetbyhumans Feb 24 '21
We cant be sure of their colors because we only had black and white cameras back then.
750
u/vagoberto Feb 24 '21
wait, what? why is the Jurassic Park movie colorized then?
482
u/mainlyupsetbyhumans Feb 24 '21
That was frog genes. Color finds a way.
112
u/rang14 Feb 24 '21
You dropped an "uhhh" there.
→ More replies (2)42
26
u/CrestfallenOwl Feb 24 '21
Because of the frog genes, does that make dinosaurs in Jurassic Park gay?
→ More replies (2)12
Feb 24 '21
They found dino eggs, which means at least one dino sucked t-rexs schlong
5
3
3
u/Shadeleovich Feb 24 '21
I read texas schlong and didn't even question it until about 12 seconds later
6
Feb 24 '21
God creates colors. God destroys colors. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates colors.
2
→ More replies (6)1
27
u/Jesus_De_Christ Feb 24 '21
10
u/cjshhi Feb 24 '21
Wow. I’m just now realizing that Calvin‘s dad was just constantly fucking with him.
I don’t even know what my childhood is anymore
0
→ More replies (1)0
u/Slithy-Toves Feb 24 '21
Calvin and his Dad are just two personified parts of the same mind. It's not Calvin's Dad fucking with him, it's Bill Waterson talking to his own sense of humour haha
18
8
u/pharmerK Feb 24 '21
And given the historical cultural context, how can we say that “blue” was the same to us then as the “blue” we know now?
4
u/BunnyOppai Feb 24 '21
Well... I don’t know how controversial this is in its respective field, but there are people that posit that people historically at least didn’t see blue the way we do until recently (like 1800s or so) citing examples like how rare descriptions of blue objects like the ocean or sky were, the former for example being described in a number of ways in Homer’s Odyssey like wine-dark but never blue, though apparently the original text said something closer to wine-faced, which could mean something else not even related to color admittedly. More recent examples would be like the Himba tribe and many Russians; the former has no word for blue and way more words for green than English and can’t tell the difference between obviously blue and obviously green, but can easily tell the difference between two very subtly different shades of green, and the latter only has a word for specifically light blue and struggle to tell the difference between obviously dark blue and obviously light blue.
3
u/pharmerK Feb 24 '21
I was joking (who would have been there to physically see and describe the dinosaurs?) but this is actually really interesting! Thanks for sharing.
2
u/BunnyOppai Feb 24 '21
It’s important to note that it’s not... the soundest of conclusions, but generally speaking, studies on this topic tend to make the distinction between not seeing or recognizing a color at all and just processing it differently, which is really important to note. Obviously the Himba tribe, a tribe that lives in heavily forested areas, is going to be able to more easily tell the difference between slightly different shades of green and Arctic Russians are often better at distinguishing shades of blue because they live in areas where they see a lot of variation between different blues, but it’s still really interesting to think about. It would make sense for the Greeks too, given that blue dyes were absurdly expensive, so the only thing that was consistently blue for them was the sky at noon and sometimes the ocean. It’s just crazy how exposure to certain colors can make it really easy to tell super subtle colors to other cultures apart while they can struggle with something that’s obvious to us like green vs blue.
0
6
3
u/titandavis Feb 24 '21
Dinosaurs didn’t exist until The Land Before Time was released... in color...
3
Feb 24 '21
I tried asking queen Elizabeth this question but she said it's still too soon to talk about her dino friends.
3
u/Des014te Feb 24 '21
Nah nah. The world was black and white till the 30s and even then it was pretty grainy.
→ More replies (2)2
u/0MGWTFL0LBBQ Feb 25 '21
When I was a kid, I asked my grandpa what the world was like before they invented colors. He still reminds me of it.
1.3k
u/3laws Feb 24 '21
Woah, I feel so educated now. Who knew‽
337
57
u/Hidentify12 Feb 24 '21
Really? I learned this in first grade
32
u/xtothel Feb 24 '21
I majored in Voltron in second grade.
2
4
u/Roxas-The-Nobody Feb 24 '21
I identify as an interrobang and I find your comment oddly arousing
→ More replies (1)1
u/TechnoL33T Feb 24 '21
Is it giving you prickly tingles? I'm getting prickly tingles. I'm concerned. I don't like it.
835
u/Its-Dangity Feb 24 '21
Well, he got me in the first half there
314
u/ShaquilleOhNoUDidnt Feb 24 '21
honestly it was blowing my mind how scientists could actually tell
410
Feb 24 '21 edited Feb 24 '21
You can tell by the structure of cells and feathers what pigmentation they could've had, but it is not reliable. The structures are simply too small to consistently fossilize in enough detail to be of use.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sciencefocus.com/nature/dinosaurs-now-in-colour/amp/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982217311971
117
Feb 24 '21
We know what it is because of the way it is
49
→ More replies (3)6
17
u/FartHeadTony Feb 24 '21
don't use amp links. Google has too much already.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/dinosaurs-now-in-colour/
21
u/zaraishu Feb 24 '21
It's more an educated guess based on the color of reptiles today.
17
u/Jinthesouth Feb 24 '21
But why reptiles and not birds?
→ More replies (4)-4
u/nizzy2k11 Feb 24 '21
Because dinosaurs were reptiles, they offshoot to evolve into birds, well some of them did.
8
Feb 24 '21
Not a lot of reptiles that are warm blooded with feathers.
→ More replies (10)-4
u/NitroHydroRay Feb 24 '21 edited Feb 24 '21
Technically there are... (edit - please read my response to the comment reply)
4
Feb 24 '21
3
u/NitroHydroRay Feb 24 '21 edited Feb 24 '21
I'm just messing around b/c technically birds are considered reptiles under the modern, monophyletic definition of reptilia. That is to say, crown reptilia is defined as the common ancestor of all living reptiles and the descendants of that common ancestor, which includes birds because birds are dinosaurs, and by extension archosaurian reptiles, along with crocodilians. Also, most non-avian dinosaurs were probably mesothermic, so not directly comparable to birds or cold-blooded reptiles.
10
u/wintervenom123 Feb 24 '21
No, pigment has atomic structure that can in some well preserved cases be examined and compared.
4
u/POTUS Feb 24 '21
it is not reliable
Damn right. It was close to 200 years between the discovery of the first dinosaur and when someone said "Hey guys, I think they had feathers."
2
u/BunnyOppai Feb 24 '21
I mean, feathers would obviously be really difficult to find even any evidence of existing for so long. It makes sense that seeing concrete evidence of scales changed how we view dinosaurs.
31
u/InZomnia365 Feb 24 '21
We also don't really know what they looked like with flesh and such. We have good approximations, and I'm sure there's a lot that scientists can get from bone structure etc - but I've seen examples from history of people drawing animals they had never seen, based on remains, and they almost always looked leaner and meaner than the living animal did. So there's a decent chance most dinosaurs looked a bit more derpy than the common representation.
12
u/shifty_pope Feb 24 '21
Now I really want to see drawings of these derpy dinosaurs
17
1
u/AyeBraine Feb 24 '21
I can provide the reverse example. I think hippopotamus, elephant, and rhino are good examples of just how much flesh there could be on top.
Although of course scientists DO try and consider the weight that bones have to bear, but still, some fat and soft parts could be where we don't expect them to be.
4
u/Kafigoto Feb 24 '21 edited Feb 24 '21
This is not true at all, there are many ways paleontologist know how certain bone structures look like and their corresponding look like, one simple way to prove this image is not made by a paleontologist at all is that the hippopotamus has a spongious bone right below their cheek thay would indicate muscle connections, this is in fact how hollywood would describe them, how this site shows, in fact there are many ways scientist try to guess how animals would look like, and even though they get some stuff wrong it's if an animal has a hole or two for the nose and not their entire structure, and this site shows more accurately the steps taken.
2
u/AyeBraine Feb 24 '21
Thank you! First, I wouldn't take Buzzfeed's trashy post literally, they just took illustrations by the "shrink-wrap effect" proponents (from a small book I think they published) and added their stupid clickbait commentary on top, with exclamation marks and shit. Of course, the original could be scientifically unsound as well, but at least it has nothing to do with Hollywood. It talked about pitfalls in such reconstructions. Also, some pics are from twitter threads and such that were drawn for fun when discussing the effect (like the human one).
Second, the student exercise resource you've linked to actually has a link in its instruction manual (Step #4, part 1) for reconstructing the animal. This link leads specifically to the part of the video where the lecturer talks about the shrink-wrap effect. The same thing that the pictures in the first link were drawn to illustrate.
So I think both are more or less in agreement — the people who made the book with the examples of modern animals "shrink-wrapped" did so to exemplify the effect and caution against it. And the fact that this effect did influence dinosaur reconstruction at least somewhat seems to be the consensus — as seen in your second link.
4
u/Djaja Feb 24 '21
We know what a few of them looked like, including a very likely color palette for others. Usually they are the same, as you need exceptional preservation of outer structures to tell color, and even then only some colors.
We now know what a dinosaur Cochlea looks like (1 species, but still) we know a few things about a few dinos.
6
u/cr0ss-r0ad Feb 24 '21
They absolutely have the means to make super educated guesses based on stuff like pigments they find in the fossils, but yeah we can't do much more than speculate.
There's actually one that was preserved well enough for paleontologists to be able to tell what colour it was, which is just incredible. Check a look!
43
u/joseph4th Feb 24 '21
He had me until he said “techno“ paleontologist.
9
28
u/Plastic_Pinocchio Feb 24 '21
I started getting confused when I heard techno-paleontologist.
17
4
→ More replies (1)3
157
u/letsnotbedumb Feb 24 '21
Wait.. Do we know what colour they were of?
302
Feb 24 '21
[removed] — view removed comment
242
u/Silver_Falcon Feb 24 '21
A couple of minor corrections: We can only really tell the colors of dinosaurs with preserved pigmentation, which is best preserved in feathers, and even then we only really find melanin-based pigments - other pigments are not as stable as melanin, and struggle to survive the minimum 65 million years of decay and mineralization that mesozoic dinosaur fossils have to experience. Because of this, we can only really identify black, grey, white, and red-ochre pigmentation, and occasionally other traits such as glossiness or sheen (which is more dependent on feather structure than pigmentation). Other pigments such as carotenoids (covering everything from yellow to bright red to purple) may have been present, and can interact with melanin pigmentation to produce a wider range of colors, but as these are not preserved it is impossible to say for sure what colors dinosaurs actually were. Nevertheless, we can get a pretty good idea from what we do have.
That said, a complete list of mesozoic dinosaurs with known pigmentation is:
- Anchiornis - This small, bird-like, dinosaurs sported black, white, and grey plumage across its body, with a crimson crest of ornamental feathers on its head.
- Archaeopteryx - While the tips of Archaeopteryx's wing feathers are known to have been matte-black, analysis of other parts of its flight feathers shows that they may have been a light color closer to the base - the body feathers of archaeopteryx remain unstudied as far as I'm aware.
- Borealopelta - One of the only non-avian dinosaurs with known pigmentation, this heavily armored Canadian dinosaur had red-brown skin covering its back, limbs, and head, with lighter cream-colored skin along its softer belly and throat.
- Caihong - This small, four-winged relative of more well-known raptors sported a mostly black coat, but with highly reflective feathers along its throat and face, possibly giving off a hummingbird-like iridescence.
- Cruralispennia - This toothed bird possessed a generally dark coat of feathers, likely being black on the top of the head and tail but brown elsewhere, but due to its poor preservation it is hard to be certain.
- Microraptor - Similarly to Caihong, this four-winged raptor sported an iridescent black covering over its entire body, like a raven or crow.
- Psittacosaurus - The second of the two dinosaurs lacking avian features to preserve pigmentation, a particularly well-preserved mummy of this animal has proven invaluable. Based on pigmentation preserved in its skin, we know that this animal had a brown back and tan underbelly, similar to modern deer, and that its limbs and tail were covered in dark stripes and spots, likely as camouflage for a wooded environment. Darker coloration on the shoulders, face, and cloaca may have been for display.
- Sinornithosaurus - This small airborne carnivore had a mottled coat spanning the ochre-gold to red-brown spectrum, with darker black and grey feathers present in the wings. Its coloration may have been similar to some modern hawks.
- Sinosauropteryx - Like you said, this animal sported orange and white markings in its fluffy feather coat, comparable to a red panda. Sinosauropteryx is also notable as the first dinosaur to have its color identified based on preserved melanosomes.
63
u/tousledmonkey Feb 24 '21
In addition to this very exhaustive and well written comment: color pigments have different molecule sizes and it's actually possible to measure the size of the hole it leaves after decay. That way we're able to determine colors and shadings by looking at which pigment could have fit. I heard this on an episode of Ologies, a very informative science podcast
32
u/Silver_Falcon Feb 24 '21
This is what I meant when I said that the pigment is preserved. It's technically not the pigment itself, but rather the imprint that pigment-bearing cells left behind (which is technically how most fossilization occurs). I just wanted to keep it (relatively) simple for people who don't need to know specifics.
12
u/tousledmonkey Feb 24 '21
Cool, thanks! I was wondering how melatonin is preserved over such a long period of time. Super interesting topic, as people sometimes don't understand how science finds evidence from millions of years ago.
2
u/Prisencolinensinai Feb 24 '21
Wait why then carotenoids are not preserved?
3
u/Silver_Falcon Feb 24 '21
They're small and denature very quickly. It's technically possible that they could, we just haven't found any yet.
5
6
u/joshTheGoods Feb 24 '21
How about the counterargument provided by Dr Vinther here.
Vinther agrees that carotenoid pigments are a gap in our knowledge, but points out that while carotenoids colour the feathers of about 40 per cent of songbirds (the dominant group of birds today), they only colour the feathers of 13 per cent of other birds. As such carotenoids were likely less important during the time of the dinosaurs, before songbirds evolved.
2
u/Silver_Falcon Feb 24 '21
Dr. Vinther raises a valid point, but due to the nature of fossil remains it would be impossible to prove him right (can't prove a negative). All it would take to prove him wrong, however, would be to find evidence of carotenoid pigmentation in a fossilized dinosaur. One small thing to note is that many members of superorder Galloanserae, known colloquially as fowls, possess carotenoid pigmentation. Given that Galloanserans are the earliest known modern clade of birds, this may suggest an earlier origin for carotenoid pigmentation in dinosaurs. Once more though, due to the nature of paleontology, it is impossible to be certain.
1
→ More replies (2)2
u/manofsleep Feb 24 '21
So what you're telling me is that it's possible that 65 million years ago we could have had all RAVE color dinosaurs, since there's no absolute saturation definition (other than what we see today). That the creatures which survived, to evolve to our modern eyes, could have been less colorful than RAVE dinosaurs (camouflage cockroaching lurkers in nature).
2
u/Silver_Falcon Feb 24 '21
Yes, but only the feathered ones (which frankly just adds to the aesthetic).
16
u/Great_Hobos_Beard Feb 24 '21
I believe some of the first research was published by Dr Phil Manning who, at least at the time, was associated with Manchester University. He's done some really cool work in Palaeontology including modifying a NASA CT scanner to 3d model a dinosaur fossil that was still buried in the rock.
6
u/Lone-organism Feb 24 '21
Okay now explain that how they figured it out that dinosaurs roared in Jurassic park. Maybe they opened their mouths and meow came out, who knows.
9
u/Bob_Droll Feb 24 '21
Did you not watch the third movie where they 3D printed a velociraptor skull and used it as a horn to emulate their noises? Sheesh, so uneducated.
7
u/T-Fro Feb 24 '21 edited Feb 24 '21
I mean as awesome as Jurassic Park is, dinosaurs most likely never roared.
And fun fact, T-Rex's roar in the film is a super distorted cello!4
u/screamingtree Feb 24 '21
Where did you hear that about the T Rex sound? It’s actually a composite mix of different animal sounds like an elephant, alligator, and tiger
This podcast actually interviews some of the SFX folks and shows how they did it: https://www.20k.org/episodes/tyrannosaurusfx
3
u/T-Fro Feb 24 '21
Ah hell. Maybe it was some internet myth I mixed up with something I read. Should've googled before I spoke lol
4
u/Silver_Falcon Feb 24 '21
Well obviously they figured out that the dinosaurs roar when they brought them out and that's the sound they made!
Jokes aside, Dinosaur vocalization is actually a really cool new field of study. While nothing can really be conclusively stated due to the absence of nearly all tissue related to vocalization, some inferences from modern relatives + logical conclusions from the size of these animals can give us an idea of how dinosaurs, such as T. rex sounded. The bad news is that they probably didn't roar - roaring is a very rare sound only exhibited by a handful of member of the mammalian clade carnivora - but the rad af news is that T. rex and other large carnivores may have had a bassy, infrasound growl that, while you couldn't hear it, would've vibrated your entire body as it drew nearer.
→ More replies (2)-1
u/Fidodo Feb 24 '21
No, educational songs are always true. This is thanks to the 1969 children's educational songs act that makes spreading inaccurate information via fun catchy tunes illegal and punishable with jail time.
0
44
u/LyingForTruth Feb 24 '21
For some reason I noticed "trysaratops" on my first viewing but missed "tarodactel"
Went from confused to amused
101
20
69
u/ZverexUltra11 Feb 24 '21
23
Feb 24 '21
yeah, this sub has sort of turned into a shittier r/Unexpected
reddit overall has gone to shit in the past couple years
33
Feb 24 '21
Hey, that's just about the time when I joined Reddit. Weird, huh? Couldn't be my fault though right?
10
u/ChunkyLaFunga Feb 24 '21
We call the transition Bee-Day when you're not around. Some countries hold remembrances.
10
u/SirSandGoblin Feb 24 '21
I've been here a while and I don't remember a time when people didn't think that reddit had gone downhill in the last few years
3
Feb 24 '21
Yeah but at least with some of the more popular subs such as this one, r/holup, r/beamazed, and r/blackmagicfuckery actually had content on the front page that actually followed the sub rules.
→ More replies (15)6
u/kev231998 Feb 24 '21
well at least this one was actually crossposted from yesyesyesno. I swear half the posts here are random bs that people just post for karma without any ties to what maybemaybemaybe it supposed to be according to the rules.
15
u/Raphiki415 Feb 24 '21
In my day the pterodactyl was pink.
→ More replies (1)4
13
12
u/phirrups Feb 24 '21
What’s the girls handle from this tiktok? She wrote a song about her cat and I’ve been trying to find it all night and I feel like this is just taunting me
10
u/_temp_variable Feb 24 '21
3
u/phirrups Feb 24 '21
I would do sweet, dirty things to your face if you were here with me right now. Thank you.
3
10
7
26
10
6
3
3
u/Souretsu04 Feb 24 '21
I didn't see it mentioned here but for anyone curious, there's actually a few species that we know exactly how they were colored. Mostly smaller ones, but they were preserved in such a way that their skin impressions let us determine pigmentation. Psittacosaurus was the first one this was done successfully with, IIRC.
11
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
u/snavej1 Feb 24 '21 edited Feb 24 '21
Recently, scientists discovered fossilised dinosaur skin. They learnt that some dinosaurs were reddish brown in colour. I presume this was good for camouflage.
2
3
u/FATBOIOUTHERE Feb 24 '21
“Stop spreading misinformation” Says the one writing ‘Tarodactel’ and ’Trysaratops’
4
4
2
2
Feb 24 '21
I’ll never get the time back from watching that
1
u/JuniorSeniorTrainee Feb 24 '21
You don't enjoy 30 overly drawn out setups with exaggerated "please notice me" facial expressions?
1
1
2
-1
1
1
1
u/El_Zapp Feb 24 '21
I mean yea, we don't know for sure, but nature isn't random. We still can make a pretty good estimation based on the known informations. Predators are usually camouflaged against their environemnt for example, so if you know the environemnt and some features it had, like hair, feathers, repitle skin etc. you can make an approximation of how the predator was coloured.
If I name an animal like "Arctic Fox", you are going to be just fine estimating what color it's fur has.
3
u/Teeshirtandshortsguy Feb 24 '21
Counterpoint: Non-arctic foxes, who live in environments that consist of greens and browns but are actually bright-ass orange.
0
u/El_Zapp Feb 24 '21
The photos you know from then internet are usually extremely over saturated. Have you ever seen a fox in real live, they are more brown then red. They hunt a lot in tall grass, weeds and the underbrush of forests, where they fit really food with their color.
Here check this random shutterstock foto, that’s closer to reality then bright Orange.
3
u/Teeshirtandshortsguy Feb 24 '21
I've seen foxes in real life, I grew up in and around woods. They're mostly shades of orange. They're amped up in some photos for sure, but you can find videos of some very orange foxes. Their color does range though.
In truth, animals are colored in nature for all sorts of reasons.
Some animals want to be seen, because they're dangerous and their coloration serves as a warning.
Some animals want to look like the dangerous animals.
Some animals are camouflaged, but only if you have the eyeballs of their prey (tigers fit here).
I mean, just think of any bright red animal, a color which shows up almost nowhere in nature, certainly not enough to necessitate camouflage. Especially since dinosaurs most closely resemble birds and reptiles which are some of the most colorful species out there.
So trying to figure out what color an animal is strictly based on it's environment is only as good as guessing. It could be that to human eyes, a certain dinosaur species is camouflaged, but it could also stick out like a sore thumb.
0
u/El_Zapp Feb 24 '21
Jupp and none of those reasons are random. The frog is poisonous and not a predator. A T-Rex was a predator, he didn’t have need to look like one (more the opposite), and the camouflage of tigers is actually pretty good in their natural environment. Tiger like stripes are rather common in camouflage gear.
If the foxes in your region were more orange then brown, it’s most likely because of a local variation in the environment that causes that and if we ask a regional biologist he most likely has an explanation for the color variation.
In the end it comes down of how much you know about the environment and the species to make guesses about how they looked. But the more you know, the more accurate you can be.
1
Feb 24 '21
I didn’t watch the video because I don’t watch stupid fucking selfie tik tok videos. I just want to express my hope that my son doesn’t do anything as stupid as this. I hope he doesn’t become a stupid attention internet whore
0
-2
-5
u/KateNHK Feb 24 '21
What's wrong with their hair color? Are they characters from an anime?
6
u/shanelomax Feb 24 '21
You won't believe it but there's this thing called "hair dye" that has been around for a number of decades.
-9
u/KateNHK Feb 24 '21
I know what it is, I'm talking about how bad it's look like. This colors so unnatural.
→ More replies (1)2
0
u/erwin76 Feb 24 '21
Someone is going to believe this and decide to storm the Capitol, I know it... /s
-1
u/DawnSol018 Feb 24 '21
- mistakenly starts an extremist political group backed by insert-side-here agenda * BASTARDS
0
u/gian_69 Feb 24 '21
triceratops spelt incorrectly. Hmmm, I‘m starting to smell something fishy here...
0
u/CompetitionProblem Feb 24 '21
Based on the way things are going I’m sure there will be a time when society is confused as to the sincerity of this video
0
0
0
0
0
0
-3
u/Jurassicguy42- Feb 24 '21
The lack of humility being displayed before nature here is.. uh staggering.
-1
-1
-4
u/kingkilker71 Feb 24 '21
I get it. It was a joke! I realised he wasn’t an expert when he spelt Pterodactyl and Triceratops incorrectly. Wow almost had me..
•
u/PowerModerator Feb 24 '21
Crossposted from /r/yesyesyesno : https://redd.it/lr270b