How do we know what dinosaurs looked like?
We have lots of bones and some foot prints, but fossils that tell us about the skins of these ancient animals are rare. We do have some skin impressions and a few hadrosaurs have been found with actual fossilized skin. We also have preserved feather impressions, both primitive and advanced. We know some dinosaurs had armored skin, some had scaly, some had leathery, and some were covered with feathers. The one thing we know nothing about for certain is color. Color does not fossilize so the best we can do is make guesses based on the colors of modern animals, especially the living dinosaurs (the birds). Dinosaurs probably sported as wide a range of colors as seen in living animals. There would be everything from camouflage stripes and spots to brilliant display colors. We can speculate that color was probably important to dinosaurs, since their “uncles” the crocodiles and their living representatives the birds mostly see in full color (partial and full color blindness is typically a mam
