The casque helps them figure out the acoustics of their surroundings, amplifying the sounds of a dense forest, helping them run about thirty miles per hour even if there doesn’t seem to be a clear path in a forest. Cassowaries run with their heads lowered, so the casque also functions as a helmet. A recent discovery of bones of the Corythoraptor jacobsi–a strutting dinosaur that lived during the Late Cretaceous period—revealed a strikingly similar skeleton to the cassowary’s, complete with a crest-like casque, reinforcing the cassowary’s nickname: The Living Dinosaur
