In Rebecca Boyle's essay "The Health Effects of a World without Darkness," in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015, she talks about ways that light pollution both keeps us from seeing the stars that all our ancestors saw and throws animals off their migration patterns.
Ancient birds had an intricate arrangement of muscles and ligaments that controlled the main feathers of their wings. This suggests that some were able to fly as well as modern birds.
Using fossilized structures known as melanosomes, researchers concluded that an ancient bat species was reddish-brown in color. More importantly, the study suggests that melanin desposits from fossils can be used to determine the color of ancient species.