Dinosaurs Looked Like Giant Chickens

If you think that dinosaurs looked like giant lizards, you'd be forgiven as that has been the depiction in stories, movies, and even in school textbooks. Scientists, however, have recently reached a different conclusion: dinos actually looked like giant chickens!

The subject of the new study—the 155-million-year-old Anchiornis huxleyi—turns out to have looked something like a woodpecker the size of a chicken, with black-and-white spangled wings and a rusty red crown [...]

The color patterns on Anchiornis's limbs are "quite similar to the silver-spangled Hamburg chicken, a domestic breed of ornamental chicken," said ornithologist Richard Prum of Yale University.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/01/100127-dinosaurs-color-feathers-science/o/