Fuzzy dinosaur had bandit mask and ‘looked like a raccoon crossed with a turkey’
A raccoon-sized, feather-clad dinosaur that roamed China 130 million years ago shared a distinctive trait with the furry modern mammal that topples trash cans in North America: a stripe across their eyes resembling a bandit mask.
Scientists said on Thursday an analysis of fossilised feathers on the dinosaur called Sinosauropteryx revealed a camouflage pattern that included the bandit mask, a light-coloured underbelly, dark-coloured back and a striped tail.
Its colour pattern also hinted at the environment Sinosauropteryx inhabited: an open savannah rather than a forest, the researchers believe.
It would have looked like a skinny version of a raccoon mixed with a turkey
“This was quite a surprising discovery,” palaeontologist Fiann Smithwick of the University of Bristol in Britain said of the bandit mask.
That feature may have given Sinosauropteryx certain advantages. In birds, the evolutionary descendants of dinosaurs, a bandit mask pattern often obscures the eyes. Predators and prey look for eyes as a giveaway of an animal’s presence, Smithwick said.
“The colour patterns we found are all known to be associated with camouflage in modern animals, and so it is likely that Sinosauropteryx was under strong predation pressure as well as needing to hide from its own prey. It was likely both the hunter and the hunted,” Smithwick added.
Sinosauropteryx measured about 1 metre long, walked on two legs, had short arms, large thumbs and a very long tail, and was covered in fuzzy filament-like feathers. Previous research indicated its dark feathers were brownish-red. It possessed small, sharp teeth, and ate small vertebrates like lizards.
