The animal above, with the fetching punk haircut is Anchiornis huxleyi—a small Chinese feathered dinosaur, about the size of a pigeon. If you look at any image of this creature from the past several years, you’ll probably find the same colour scheme—a body of black and grey, black-and-white stripes on the wings, and a red crest and freckles.

That’s because, in 2010, a group of scientists reconstructed Anchiornis’ colours. It was one of the first of several papers that heralded a renaissance of dinosaur art, assigning actual palettes to creatures whose colour schemes were long thought to be unknowable. Colours, after all, don’t fossilise.

But melanosomes do. These tiny pigment-containing structures are found in feathers and contribute to the colours of living