The dance tradition has survived five centuries of cultural changes and fused Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past with its present ...

More information: Kiat, Yosef et al, Functional constraints on the number and shape of flight feathers, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2306639121 ...

An Archaeopteryx fossil, complete with visible imprints of its feathers. Credit: Shutterstock Not all birds can fly. Penguins, ostriches, and kiwis are some famous examples. It’s pretty easy to figure ...

And the secret to flight are these feather-covered arms we call wings. Inside a bird's wing are the same bones you have in your arm with fused fingers near the tip.

After flight, another obvious function of feathers is color. Every bird, whether it flies or not, uses this function.

Some more recently-evolved feather adaptations, like the asymmetry in the flight feathers that allows birds to fly, are easier to change, and thus disappear relatively quickly once birds no longer ...

If you find a bird feather – how can you tell which species it belongs to? An ornithologist in the Forensic Laboratory at the ...

Flight feathers are stiff and, because birds can control their positions, act almost like individual wings. The individual feather "branches" (or, more correctly, barbs) have their own barbules ...

Scientifically, we refer to the tail's flight feathers as the rectrices (one feather is a rectrix.) To keep things simple, I'll call the rectrices tail feathers.

This is just the wing tip of what we saw from the Take Flight With Feather contest. With more than 80 entries, you definitely need to check out all the creative ways people found to build their ...

“It's really surprising, that with so many styles of flight we can find in modern birds, they all share this trait of having between 9 and 11 primary feathers,” says Kiat.