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 ...

When you picture a dinosaur, what does it look like? Maybe you think of four-legged herbivores like Apatosaurus or Triceratops. Maybe you imagine large armored dinosaurs like Ankylosaurus or ...

We’ve known for a long time that birds are the closest living relatives of dinosaurs, but new clues are shedding light on a transitional phase in how feathers came to be. Feathers are one of nature’s ...

About 90 million years ago, a very small feathered dinosaur, whose cousins evolved into modern birds, lived in Patagonia. In ...

A fossil from China that’s 150 million years old may be the world’s earliest known bird. The discovery shows that the short tails characteristic of modern birds evolved much earlier than previously ...

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 ...

The bones of a 160-million-year-old dinosaur are helping scientists solve one of evolution’s biggest mysteries: how birds gained flight. Hidden within the wrist of a small, feathered dinosaur lies a ...

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 ...

When you picture a dinosaur, what does it look like? For Jingmai O'Connor, paleobiologist and associate curator of reptiles at the Field Museum of... Birds are dinosaurs. Here's how scientists know ...

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 ...