A Rainbow of Dinosaurs

My son has recently become a fan of the show, Dino Dan. I’m something of a fan myself. And I’m now sorry I didn’t go to school in Canada, as apparently, in Canada, the classes have only six kids, everybody is nice to everybody (including the severely mentally ill student who sees dinosaurs everywhere), and The Kids in the Hall and Andrea Martin are the teachers! It’s pretty great.

HOWEVER, I do have a beef with the show: it’s the dinosaurs’ coloring. It’s, um, vibrant. Super-vibrant. It’s a trend I’ve noticed in recent years. Where dinosaurs used to be portrayed as brown and green and gray, they are now being portrayed as pretty much the clowns of the pre-historic world. My question is “why?”

I know it’s become more popular to assume that dinosaurs were vibrantly-colored, but I’ve done a little bit of Googling on the subject and there doesn’t seem to be any definitive proof that dinosaurs were colorful at all. The best proof I could get of interesting coloring was an article where it said that maybe a feathered dinosaur had a bit of rust on him. OK, that’s nice. But how do we get from “this  one feathered dinosaur maybe had a bit of rust on him” to “all dinosaurs basically looked like Grateful Dead t-shirts?” I mean, there seems to be some proof of patterning, but do we have any proof the patterns were vibrantly-colored?

I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer when it comes to dinosaur-coloring. Quite the opposite. I’d think it were really neat if dinosaurs were all colors of the rainbow. I guess I’m just going to need more proof of intense coloring before I stopped being jarred by the newer artist renderings.