A paper published last year in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface described a feather as a masterpiece of engineering, one comprising nine orders of magnitude, from the nanoscale to the meter ...

Birds can fly—at least, most of them can. Flightless birds like penguins and ostriches have evolved lifestyles that don't require flight. However, there's a lot that scientists don't know about how ...

Recent research delving into the intricate world of bird feathers has uncovered a fascinating discovery: a distinct set of feather rules governing flight capabilities. This breakthrough sheds light on ...

The striking gold/red plumage and characteristic forked tail of the red kite have always been a joy to behold from the ground ...

Flight feathers are amazing evolutionary innovations that allowed birds to conquer the sky. A study led by Matthew Towers (University of Sheffield, UK) and Marian Ros (University of Cantabria, Spain) ...

It isn't clear how and when feathered dinosaurs, the ancestors of present day birds, started to fly. Analysis of the fossilized remains of a winged dinosaur that lived in China 160 million years ago, ...

More than 99% of birds can fly. But that still leaves many species that evolved to be flightless, including penguins, ...

Researchers have performed molecular analysis on fossil feathers from a small, feathered dinosaur from the Jurassic. Their research could aid scientists in pinpointing when feathers evolved the ...

Back in the day, when I hunted ruffed grouse with my father, we often shot at the same bird more than once. That's because we were mediocre marksmen at best, often missing the bird with the first ...

One of the remarkable abilities that birds possess is their ability to regenerate the feathers that they shed. Unlike human ...

Scientists examined hundreds of birds in museum collections and discovered a suite of feather characteristics that all flying birds have in common. These 'rules' provide clues as to how the dinosaur ...