Nature is full of colors, from the spectacular brilliance of a peacock’s feathers to the warning coloration of toxic frogs or the snowy camouflage of polar bears … colors mark the life of our world.
Unfortunately, structural details for color preservation are rarely preserved in the fossil record, making most fossil reconstructions based on imagination. Now, a team of scientists from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS) has managed to discover the true colors of 99 million-year-old insects from the Middle Cretaceous period.
Experts found a treasure trove of 35 specimens trapped in amber in a mine in northern Myanmar that preserve the delicate morphology of insect species that coexisted with dinosaurs.
“Amber is from the Middle Cretaceous, is approximately 99 million years old, and dates back to the golden age of dinosaurs,” said CAI Chenyang, associate professor at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS ).
The insects are colored metallic blue, green and yellow and there is even a species of beetle impregnated with blue and purple . “We have seen thousands of amber fossils, but the preservation of color in these specimens is extraordinary,” said Huang Diying, co-author of the work published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The researchers used electron microscopy to show that amber fossils have a “well-preserved exoskeleton nanostructure that scatters light.”
“Our observations suggest that the preserved color in some amber fossils may be the same as that displayed by insects when they were alive, about 99 million years ago,” the authors wrote. “This is further corroborated by the fact that the metallic blue-green coloration is frequently found in today’s cuckoo wasps.”
Referencia: Structural colours in diverse Mesozoic insects, Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2020). rspb.royalsocietypublishing.or … .1098/rspb.2020.0301
