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Dinosaur Feather Color Discovered 219

anzha writes "Do you remember being a kid and told we'd never know what colors the dinosaurs were? For at least some, that's no longer true. Scientists working in the UK and China have closely examined the fossils of multiple theropods and actually found the colors and patterns that were present in the fossilized proto-feathers. So far, the answer is orange, black and white in banded and other patterns. The work also thoroughly thrashes the idea that fossils might not be feathers, but collagen fibers instead. If this holds up, Birds Are Dinosaurs. Period. And colorful!"

Comment Re:I OBJECT!! (Score 2, Informative) 149

Here is a more complete story: between changing compilers, moving from the development platform to the target platforms, and identifying some redundant computation in one corner of the algorithm, we were able to reduce the run-time from about six hours to five minutes. This allowed us to undo some rather brutal compromises (accuracy for speed) we had made in a previous stage of development, when we thought the analysis was running unacceptably long for Grid purposes.

The extra hours are not busy work.

Christian Cumbaa
Research Associate
Ontario Cancer Institute

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