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 ...

Peacocks are often thought to be land birds, but did you know they can fly as well? Although they usually fly only in short ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

Progress in solving the particularly puzzling origin of feathers has also been hampered by what now appear to be false leads, such as the assumption that the primitive feather evolved by elongation ...

Flying birds molt their feathers when they are old and worn because they inhibit flight performance, and the molt strategy is typically a sequential molt. Molting is thought to be unorganized in the ...

In late autumn a male great horned owl sent his soft, deep hoots out from a stand of trees in Minnetonka. He'd been away for two months and was making it known that this was still his territory, after ...

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 ...