Composition? I tried googling it. Found an article which says that while hair is made of keratin, feathers are also made of keratin, but the keratin is different.
¯(ツ)_¯
Maybe someone who knows what they are talking about will chime in. I am not that person.
Feathers, but very simple filament-like ones. Remember - feathers haven't evolved for flight. No idea how cuddly they were (you'd have to ask a paleontologist), but I'm just going to assume "extremely".
We do, actually! Recent research proved there are melanosomes in some fossils/imprints, which were previously thought to be bacteria. This gives us a fairly good idea of the colouring of certain species. Check out this sinosauropteryx:
I highly recommend reading the book Dinosaurs: New Visions of a Lost World. It's fun to read, has amazing illustrations and was written by one of the people who discovered this.
He didn't really give up, rather got almost killed and now, reduced to being little more than a corpse, has to sit on the Golden Throne or the galaxy will get swallowed by hell.
I don't have a strong opinion on this, since in my language we use the same word for both. I'm aware of the difference in English, but but I just don't have it internalised enough to care if someone makes a mistake.
There's already a sourceport called Woof.