Iridescence in dinosaur feathers
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.023641
Physics Today : Last year, Derek Briggs , director of Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History, and colleagues discovered that tiny fossilized structures usually 1-2âμm long, which were previously believed to be the remains of bacteria on fossilized feathers, were in fact carbon deposits called melanosomes that could produce black and white strips on the ancient feathers.
Briggs’s team published new research in the journal Biology Letters, based on 40-million-year-old fossilized feathers obtained from deposits in Messel, Germany. Using scanning electron microscopy, the team proved that shining some light on the melanosomes can create a diffraction pattern whose iridescence, or color sheen, is similar to that seen on modern bird feathers.
“Discovery of a color-producing nanostructure in a fossil feather opens up the possibility that we someday be able to determine such colors in fossil birds, as well as in feathered dinosaurs,” said H. Richard Lane, a paleontologist and program director in NSF’s Division of Earth Sciences.
“The feathers produced a black background with a metallic greenish, bluish or coppery color at certain angles—much like the colors we see in starlings and grackles today,” said Richard Prum , one of the paper’s authors.
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