Dark feathers may help birds fly more efficiently. They heat up the animals’ wings and the surrounding air, which might help increase airflow over the wing. Svana Rogalla at Ghent University in ...

Some feathered dinosaurs like Anchiornis huxleyi may have lost the ability to fly, revealing that the evolution of flight was ...

Ever since the first humans saw birds gracefully soaring through the sky above their heads, we have been asking two questions: how do they do that, and how can we learn to do that? Centuries of ...

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 ...

Scans of the most well-preserved fossil of a prehistoric flying reptile with intact feathers have revealed how the first birds managed to fly while their non-bird dinosaur cousins could not. The ...

A Fork-tailed Flycatcher. Credit: Valentina Gómez-Bahamón, Field Museum Bird feathers have many different functions. Softer down keeps a bird warm and stiffer wing feathers are used for flight.

The structures zipping together the barbs in bird feathers could provide a model for new adhesives and new aerospace materials, according to a new study. Researchers 3D printed models of the ...

Each Canada goose that you see flying around in formation around Lancaster County these days has between 20,000 and 25,000 feathers, most hidden from sight. A typical songbird at your backyard feeder ...

Dark feathers may help birds fly more efficiently. They heat up the animals’ wings and the surrounding air, which might help increase airflow over the wing. Svana Rogalla at Ghent University in ...

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 ...