A team of paleontologists at Yale University revealed their success in determining the actual colors of an extinct species of dinosaur.

Dr. Prum and his colleagues took benefit of the fact that feathers contain pigment-loaded sacs called melanosomes. In 2009, they discovered that melanosomes survived for millions of years in fossil bird feathers.

The knowledge about the shape and arrangement of melanosomes have assisted them to produce the color of feathers, hence they managed to get hints about the color of fossil feathers from their melanosomes alone.

Yale graduate student Jakob Vinther, after analyzing the melanosomes present in the fossil, the team was able to compare that data with the types of melanosomes known to create particular colors in modern-day birds.

The discovery, which the researchers unveiled last week in Nature, supports research depicting that birds are dinosaurs, belong to a group of bipedal dinosaurs called theropods.

The study follows a related study of the same animal conducted by colleagues in China who assisted identify two of the melanosomes present in the fossil record.