Nearly all large animals today communicate both vocally (with sound) and visually (with sight), so there is little doubt dinosaurs did, too.
![[T-Rex]](./dinosaur/trex.gif)
Dinosaurs colors didn't fossilize along with dinosaur bones. More and more paleontologists today believe that many dinosaurs must have been as colorful in form as they were in function (camouflage), just so long as they didn't draw the attention of a hungry T. rex.
Birds and reptiles, the closest living relatives of dinosaurs, both sport colorful patterns and can see in color, so dinosaurs likely did the same. If dinosaurs could see color, most researchers suspect, they probably took advantage of color for the same reasons animals do today: camouflage from predators, attracting attention during the mating season and even warning away aggressors as skunks do with their unmistakable black-and-white stripes.
Giants blending in
![[Plateosaurus]](./dinosaur/plateosaurus.jpg)
Large dinosaurs like the long-necked, lumbering sauropods would have had the most incentive to use color as a way of blending in, simply because they could not move very fast if they were unlucky enough to catch the eye of a predator.
Strutting males
![[Triceratops]](./dinosaur/tri.gif)
But many dinosaurs boasted elaborate adornments: Consider the massive frills and horns of Triceratop and its fellow ceratopsians, the sail-like fin down the back of Spinosaurus and the knobby ridges atop Allosaurus' head. It's only reasonable that color would have been a part of such displays; perhaps it even came and went with the breeding season. Just as male peacocks are the showoffs of their kind, male dinosaurs might have been flashier, "because the females pick, but the guys have to strut," says Kenneth Carpenter of the Denver Museum of Natural History.
"It didn't have to be really gaudy - there could be just some simple coloration around the eyes that says, 'I'm ready to breed,'" Brett-Surman adds. "You don’t have to signal the whole world, you just have to signal your potential mates."
Any color would have brightened pebbly, scaly dinosaur skin, which is known mainly from a few impressions left in ancient mud. Dinosaur scales did not overlap like those of lizards, but nestled up against each other like hexagonal ceramic tiles in sometimes ornate patterns, with a series of smaller scales surrounding each larger one. Paleontologists as early as the turn of the century suggested the patterns might take on even more prominence if the larger and smaller scales came in different colors.
"The skin has definite patterns and you'd expect that to some extent to be reflected in color, as it is with reptiles today," says paleontologist Dale Russell of North Carolina State University. "But there's also a hazard to drawing attention to yourself. If you're a predator, you don't want to give yourself away."
