Scientists discover world's oldest colors

[TexasTowelie]

The pink pigments, called porphyrins, were extracted from rocks more than a billion years old. Photo by ANU


July 9 (UPI) -- Scientists have unearthed the world's oldest colors, or pigments, from deep beneath the Sahara.

Researchers found 1.1 billion-year-old pink pigments inside ancient rocks dredged from beneath Africa's Great Desert. The colors are more than 500 million years older than the next oldest pigments.

"The bright pink pigments are the molecular fossils of chlorophyll that were produced by ancient photosynthetic organisms inhabiting an ancient ocean that has long since vanished," Nur Gueneli, an earth scientist at Australia National University, said in a news release.

When diluted, the pigments appear a light pink. When concentrated inside ancient marine shales, the pigments take on a variety of tints, from blood red to deep purple.

Read more: https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2018/07/09/Scientists-discover-worlds-oldest-colors/3531531167532/

[luvallpeeps]

1. coolio

like pinkish amber

[Mike Nelson]

2. That lady...

… is holding up something that looks orange, to me.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

3. As always, 1) Your monitor may not be calibrated recently, or profiled,

2) The photographer may not have used a color checker to calibrate the shot.

3) The lighting may not be standard that the camera / post-processing would find automatically.

4) The lighting may have a spiky spectrum like much fluorescent lighting, which is hard to correct for even if items 1 & 2 have been taken care of.

5) The camera angle in that shot would capture a significant amount of transmitted light from a range of angles (due to refraction (lensing effect)), so there could be the scientist's skin tone affecting the color.

6) Human vision varies.