Did Dinosaurs Shine?

I have no respect for people who think feathers make dinosaurs less cool.

Let's take the cassowary, probably the most dinosaur-like bird on the planet. And the most dangerous - they're flightless, one meter tall and yes, they've killed people.

They are also shiny. Really shiny. Furthermore, the mechanism that makes cassowary feathers shine is not the same as other iridescent birds.

Other bird feathers iridesce because of the structure of the barbules. There's no pigmentation, they literally have that color because of the way they refract lights.

Cassowaries have those refracting structures in the spine of the feather. The theory is that it moved there because they lost their barbules as they became flightless.

Except we now know that feathers came before flight.

Did dinosaur feathers iridesce? Did it start in the spine of the feather and move out to the barbules as flight evolved?

Was T-Rex shiny?

Maybe we'll be able to work this out from fossils eventually. But in the mean time, I'm going to have fun envisioning shiny dinosaurs.

Because shiny dinosaurs are cool.