‘Jurassic Park’ fans could learn a lot about real dinosaurs in this book

The little ginger-colored creature on the cover of Michael J. Benton’s Dinosaurs Rediscovered is a Sinosauropteryx, a 2-pound dinosaur that lived in China in the early Cretaceous Period, roughly 125 million years ago. The illustrator didn’t make up the color. This was the first dinosaur to have its feather color determined.

Benton and his colleagues at the world-renowned Paleobiology Research Group; melanosomes are hollows in feathers that held the pigment melanin. “We could say for the first time,” Benton writes, “we had discovered for sure the colour of a dinosaur.”