If you push things too far, you go with poker dots, and purple and pink, your audience simply won't believe it. But if you draw upon the examples of our living animals, we can actually gain a lot just by looking at crocodile skin, the colouration in maybe some lizards and fish even, and it will remain believable. 

 

Like everything in the exhibition, the finished work will have to be approved by Luis. 

 

So one thing we need to keep in mind is that although we want to have some variation in pattern or in colour, they obviously all need to look the same species.

 

You’re gonna give me some freedom to experiment on some colours, maybe in the face or the throat.

 

I still think that overall we want to stick to standard gray, green, brown. I think that will be nice to subtle that something can be viewed when you are looking at it from, you know, six feet away.

 

Although the colour of fruitadens is unknown, new scientific breakthroughs are allowing paleontologists to see some dinosaurs in a way that's never been possible before. 

 

We are still learning more about dinosaurs, as increasing numbers of specimens come to light, but also as the techniques that we used to analyses them become more and more sophisticated. And I'm off to meet somebody now who has made great discoveries in one particular aspect of dinosaur science that many people thought would remain hidden forever.

 

OK. So this is what we are now going to look at, hold this, put this in. it will take a minute or two to fire up the vacuum. 

 

Pro.  Mike Benton recently came across the remains of a dinosaur that was so exquisitely well preserved that feathers as well as bones had fossilized. Incredibly, those feathers can tell us the colour of a dinosaur that lived 125 million years ago.