'The chemistry of life is like poetry,' says Phillip Manning, a palaeontologist at the University of Manchester in the UK. 'By the time it's been buried for a few million years that poetry is still there, it's just hard to read.' To continue his analogy, all that remains of the biochemical poetry that determines colour are a few fragmented sentences and jumbled letters. Trying to rebuild these into something that makes sense is by no means easy.