Do you remember drab dinosaurs?

The elephantine reptiles waddled and soaked in almost every dinosaur book I pulled from my elementary school’s libraries. The unhurried reptiles basked in an endless Mesozoic summer, great lumps draped in various shades of mud. I still see such throwbacks sometimes on the side of the road, the great green mascot of Sinclair Oil. And they’ve always seemed wrong.

I remember the logic behind it. Large mammals like elephants, rhinos, and hippos are drab - giraffes always conveniently left off this list of megafauna - and so large dinosaurs were probably plain, too. And what reason would dinosaurs of such size have to wear striking colors? To impress each other? Such experts must have thought of sauropod courtship and mating as one animate hill climbing onto another animate hill before moving off to eat more plants.