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 ...

"The introductory chapters give a detailed overview of the feather - how feathers developed, the parts of a single feather, and the variety of types of feathers on a bird. In the feather ...

Birds of a feather may flock together, but the feathers of birds differ altogether. New research from an international team led by USC scientists set out to learn how feathers developed and helped ...

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.

Note to editors: Photos of the Himalayan birds studied by the research team and other associated press materials can be found via Dropbox here (password: feathers). Feathers are a sleek, intricate ...

Explore the colors of songbird migration in a photo essay that displays the ways distance and timing affect plumage. In late summer and autumn, millions of birds fly above our heads, often at night, ...

Charles Darwin is most famous for his finches, from whose beaks he gleaned the idea that a single species might radiate into many. But he studied other attributes of birds, too—like the rhythmic ...