(Reuters) - Scientists have unearthed in southeastern China the fossil of a quail-sized bird that lived about 150 million years ago during the Jurassic Period and possessed surprisingly modern traits, ...

Palaeontologist Steve Brusatte's The Story of Birds offers an excellent and sometimes startling account of bird evolution, ...

Few subjects in evolutionary theory have posed such intriguing puzzles for so long as the origin of birds. Evidence of avian beginnings has been elusive in the fossil record because birds' light, ...

A pigeon pecking at crumbs in a city square rarely attracts much attention. It is easy to see it as an ordinary bird, part of ...

Birds descended from theropod dinosaurs by the Late Jurassic, but our understanding of the earliest evolution of the Avialae, the clade comprising all modern birds but not Deinonychus or Troodon, has ...

Everyone knows what a bird is – and pretty much everyone knows what a dinosaur is. But not everyone is aware that birds evolved from dinosaurs approximately 160 million years ago. In fact, birds and ...

The woodpecker is a unique bird species that has gone through some mysteriously acquired adaptations since the extinction of the dinosaurs. Fossils tell us, without any explanations of course (because ...

Gear-obsessed editors choose every product we review. We may earn commission if you buy from a link. Why Trust Us? For years, scientists have split neoaves (which make up 95 percent of bird species) ...

Professor Emily Jane McTavish and colleagues at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have mapped the evolution of every known bird species. They created a complete evolutionary tree of bird species by ...

Birds teach each other how to build a home ...

Aliza Chasan is a Digital Content Producer for "60 Minutes" and CBSNews.com. She has previously written for outlets including PIX11 News, The New York Daily News, Inside Edition and DNAinfo. Aliza ...