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 ...

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.

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...