One of the stranger side effects of the Fisher-Oliver process was that it allowed, for the first time, actual color information to be retrieved from the genetic information of fossils and sub fossils. Naturally, this led to paleontological geneticists to use the process on the most popular of dinosaurs, with the hope that the subsequent media attention would lead to future funding. In most other cases, the Fisher-Oliver process had worked flawlessly, revealing trilobites to be, in general, a pale olive while also astounding scholars in revealing that the thycaleo or marsupial lion had leopard-like spots.

But when applied to Cretaceous dinosaurs, the results were stunning: not only were there dozens if not hundreds of colors, varying by individual and across feather and skin, but the colors were by and large pigments that existed beyond the spectrum of visible light and appeared to have clashing, mutually contradicting pigments: so-called hyper colors. The hyper color t-rex, it seemed, was possessed of colors that no living eye could perceive and no extant color system could display, for reasons unknown. In the end, unsatisfied by this answer, the researchers substituted known colors for hyper colors, resulting in the infamous “neon giant chicken” display at the Field Museum in Chicago.

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