Iridescence in pterosaur pycnofibers and the evolution of integumentary coloration

2026 · doi:10.64898/2026.05.06.723168
preprint OA: closed
Full text JSON View at publisher
⚙ AI-generated deep summary by claude@2026-07, 2026-07-04 · read from full text ⓘ

This paper studied integumentary coloration in pterosaurs by examining a previously undescribed Early Cretaceous specimen of the tapejarid Sinopterus dongi with optical and structural analyses focused on its pycnofibres. The authors identified a layered internal arrangement of melanosomes that includes a photonic nanostructure within the monofilaments, and optical simulations indicated that this nanostructure would produce green-to-magenta iridescent coloration. A key caveat is that the coloration inference is based on simulations of the identified structures rather than direct observation of color in vivo. This paper does not explicitly discuss endometriosis or adenomyosis; it was included in the corpus via a keyword match in the upstream search index.

Read from the paper's body, not the abstract. Not a substitute for reading the paper. No clinical advice. How this works

Full text 937 characters · extracted from oa-doi-fallback · click to expand
Abstract The bodies of pterosaurs, the first flying vertebrates, are covered with integumentary filaments (pycnofibres) thought to be homologous to feathers in dinosaurs, but their coloration remains unknown. Here, we report a layered internal arrangement of melanosomes containing a photonic nanostructure within the monofilaments in a previously undescribed specimen of tapejarid pterosaur Sinopterus dongi from the Early Cretaceous Jehol Biota. Optical simulations showed that this structure reflects green to magenta iridescent coloration, confirming the presence of melanosome-based iridescent coloration previously thought to be unique to birds. This finding deepens our understanding of structure/color gamut relationships in amniotes, while supporting further shared characteristics associated with derived genetic and regulatory shifts in archosaurs. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

Text is read by the "Ask this paper" AI Q&A widget below. Extraction quality varies by source — PMC NXML preserves structure cleanly, OA-HTML may include some navigation residue, and OA-PDF can have broken hyphenation. The publisher copy (via DOI) is the canonical version.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

⚙ Ask this paper AI returns verbatim quotes from the full text · source: oa-doi-fallback ⓘ

Answers must be backed by verbatim quotes from this paper's full text. Hallucinated quotes are dropped automatically; if no verbatim passage answers the question, we say so. How this works

Citation neighborhood (no data yet)

We don't have any in-corpus citations linked to this paper yet. This is a recent paper (2026) — citers typically take a year or two to land, and the OpenAlex reference graph may still be filling in.

Source provenance

europepmc
last seen: 2026-05-20T01:45:00.602351+00:00