Release Date:
Apr 14, 2026
Dr. Paul Gignac’s new paper in Scientific Reports reveals that that cassowary casques—the bony, keratin-covered cranial ornaments of these large flightless birds—exhibit biofluorescence under ultraviolet light. The discovery, the first of its kind in cassowaries, found species-specific fluorescence patterns that allow individual birds to be "fingerprinted" in the wild, like whale tail fluke patterns. Read more at National Geographic here.