Part A Pigments don't survive fossilization even though we have fossil skin from dinosaurs, we don't know what color they were. But fossilization does preserve structure Specimens from a rare cache of 50 -million-year-old beetle fossils still show the microscopic layers that produced structural colors in the living creatures, and we can deduce the colors from an understanding of thin-film interference. One fossil showed
80nm
plates of fossilized chitin (modern samples have index of refraction
n=1.56
) embedded in fossillzed tissue (for which we can assume
n=1.33
) What is the longest wavelength for which there is constructive interference for reflections from opposite sides of the chitin layers? Express your answer with the appropriate units.