Birds tend to be more colorful in the tropics, and scientists wanted to find out how they got there: if colorful feathers evolved in the tropics, or if tropical birds have brightly-colored ancestors ...

There are more than 11,000 different bird species in the world that have a variety of colors. Recently, a group of scientists at Washington University in St. Louis wrote a study about why birds may ...

Feathers, essential for thermoregulation, flight, and communication in birds, originate from simple appendages known as proto-feathers, which were present in certain dinosaurs.By studying embryonic ...

What makes a blue jay blue or a cardinal red? Color, a crucial element in nature, is most evident in the amazing hue and pattern variations in more than 10,000 bird species around the world. How birds ...

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 ...

Feathers are among the most complex cutaneous appendages in the animal kingdom. While their evolutionary origin has been widely debated, paleontological discoveries and developmental biology studies ...