Life uses color to brightly signal their existence or in an attempt to hide it.
A new study from a University of Arizona researcher looked into the colors life uses to attract mates and to warn predators.
The study found animals evolved to have color vision about 400 million years ago. That was before life adapted to have conspicuous colors, which are used by animals to stick out from their background.
Plants first started to use flashy colors to differentiate between flowers and fruit, before animals started to stand out.
About 100 million years ago, some species started to use colors to show sex differences and others as a warning signal they could be toxic.
Study Co-author John Wiens says they used DNA information to map out a timeline.
“We can map traits onto this tree and figure out when they evolved. And that's more or less how people figured out when color vision evolved," Wiens said.
Wiens said while the paper helped map out when animals evolved color vision, there is still more to research into how it first evolved.
It was published in the journal Biological Review.
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