‘Best Ever’ View Of Winged Dinosaurs Now Available

There had been different ways people approached the presence of dinosaurs over the years. Whether it is a random creature in children's films like Disney's Dinosaur (2000), Pixar's The Good Dinosaur (2015) or even as a smash hit like Steven Spielberg's Jurrasic Park (1993) and its sequels, dinosaurs are among the creatures that fascinated people as modern humans.

Unfortunately, they existed long before humans did. By the time people had the ability to keep records, these are all assumed to be long gone. This is why people never had a concrete view of what dinosaurs looked like with skin -- until now.

According to BBC, a dinosaur that lived 160 million years ago, with drumstick-shaped legs like modern birds, has been studied using high-powered lasers to reveal details of what the creature may have looked like. The lasers generate light that interacts with minerals in the specimen, making them generally glow in the dark to fill in key details regarding the physical attributes of the prehistoric animal.

As quoted by Popular Science, Tom Kaye noted, "It's a marriage of very old fossils with very new technology that's allowing us to see things that we've never seen before."

As it turns out, these dinosaurs looked very bird-like. The images showed that the non-bird dinosaur had wings similar to those of today's living creatures. Anchiornis, as the dinosaur was aptly called, means "almost bird." It was said to have lived in China during the late Jurassic Period, around the same time birds have appeared.

In the study published in Nature Communications, the creature was revealed to have been black with white stripes and distinctive orange feather crest on its crown. However, the laser that showed the missing pieces of the dinosaur was not able to determine whether or not the Anchiornis could fly or even glide.