Terrible Lizards podcast episode 3, "Dinosaur Feathers" brought up a good point about Sinosauropteryx prima: just because we have found some melanosomes in two specimens, we don't know a whole lot about the color of Sinosauropteryx as a whole. It could have had other forms of coloration not preserved (such as structural colour), it may have had gender-specific or ontogenetic or even seasonal color variation, and almost certainly there would have been color and pattern variation between populations of S. prima both in the spatial and temporal sense. That's not even touching the possibility of other Sinosauropteryx species, that would have almost certainly have had their own signature colors and patterns.

This inspired me to experiment with how variable this little coelurosaur could have and to some extent even should have been. Take this lot with a grain of salt as many of these variants are based on color variants naturally found in foxes, and synapsids and archosaurs can be different in many respects. However there is some truth to it. Melanistic, leucistic and albinistic individuals definitely appear in avians, and some color variants similar to ones seen here are also found in some species of bird. Gender dimorphism is also common, so some of these could plausibly represent males and the others females.

We will never know the full range of colors or patterns in any extinct dinosaur, but the point of this graphic is to broaden your mind about the possibilities that exist beyond the known even in species we can learn the colours of from fossils. So if you ever see a Sinosauropteryx illustration where the colors seem wrong to you, please consider the possibility that you're just looking at a variant that didn't make it to the fossil record.

(The color and patterns of the "Yixian red" individual is based closely on the 2017 paper by Smithwick et al.)

https://www.deviantart.com/osmatar/art/SinosauroColor-865974216