Ancient mammals all had the same colour fur for this unlikely reason

Fossils provide a direct glimpse into Earth’s fascinating past, helping us understand ancient life and the evolution of the species we all know and love today.

And now a study has given us an incredible idea of the way early mammals looked and to be honest, they’re not as bright and colourful as you might have assumed - and for a very good reason.

The research looked at the fossilised fur of six mammals from the Jurassic and Cretacious periods and scientists have found they were all the same dull colour - greyish brown. Figuring out the appearance of early animals has become easier over time and since the 1990s, thousands of fossils with feathers and fur have been found.

Some of these fossils contain traces of melanosomes, the organelles that produce, store, and transport melanin. The traces can be seen when fossils are examined under a microscope.

Melanin exists in two forms - black-brown and yellow-red - and the shape of melanosomes varies depending on their composition. By studying he shape of melanosomes in fur or feathers, scientists can predict their colour.

The Arboroharamiya fuscus is a newly described speciesChuang Zhao and Ruoshuang Li

A research team looked at the melanosomes in the fur of a diverse range of 116 living mammals and from this they created a model that predicts fur colour based on melanosome shape. This research was then applied to six fossils of different early mammals.

All six fossils came from the same deposits in China, however the species lived at different times spanning the Middle Jurassic to the Early Cretaceous, this was around 165 million to 120 million years ago.

One of the mammals included was the newly described Arboroharamiya fuscus, an extinct gliding mammal that resembled a modern flying squirrel that lived around 159 million years ago. But why were mammals so unassuming? “They were dinosaur food,” Matthew Shawkey at Ghent University told New Scientist. It’s also believed that they were also nocturnal creatures.

“We expected them to have pretty subdued colours,” says Shawkey. “The one thing I was surprised by is how invariant they were. The colours were even more similar than I would have predicted.”

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