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Dark coats may have helped the earliest mammals hide from hungry dinosaurs

The spots and stripes familiar to us today didn't arise until later in mammalian evolution

An illustration of small rodentlike mammals on a dense, lush forest floor

Small mammals during the Mesozoic Era (some illustrated) may have had uniformly dark coloring, allowing them to blend into nocturnal environments.

Chuang Zhao, Ruoshuang Li

By Jake Buehler

Zebra stripes? Leopard print? Neither were in vogue among the earliest mammals during the Age of Dinosaurs.

Early mammals and their close relatives probably sported dark, drab coats from snout to tail, researchers report in the March 14 Science.