Iridescent plumage in a Cretaceous Bird.
[sciencythoughts.blogspot.com]
Modern Birds produce a wide range of pigments, enabling them to produce a wide range of coloured feathers. In many species, this is further enhanced by the addition of structural colours, which enable iridescent plumage colouring not seen in any other terrestrial organisms except some insects. This is achieved through the presence of photonic crystals with periodic changes in their refractive index (i.e. as light passes through the crystal it encounters multiple refractive layers which scatter it in the same way that a water or glass surface can. In the case of Birds, this is done with the aid of stacks of transparent, melanosomes (pigment cells) within the keretin of the feather. Four different types of iridescent melanosomes have been found in modern Birds, solid cylindrical, solid flattened, hollow cylindrical, and hollow flattened, with the flat and hollow forms having no analogue in non-iridescent feathers.
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