How do scientists study the behaviour of dinosaurs, who died 65 million years ago? After all, dinosaur fossils are rare enough as it is, and most are fragments and difficult to work with.
This is something that palaeontologists have been working on since the earliest days of research on these incredible animals. Until recently, this was often only in vague terms of, for example, which animals were herbivores or carnivores.
But new opportunities are becoming available to us. Palaeontologists have recently pieced together the colours and patterns of some feathered dinosaurs, using electron microscopes to see tiny preserved structures that used to contain the pigments of the animals in life. This is something that scientists used to think was probably impossible.
