The male desert sandgrouse might not be much to look at, but his belly feathers give him the unique ability to absorb and carry water. Researchers have, for the first time, closely examined the ...

Dippers (Cinclidae) are the only passerines that find their prey almost exclusively under water. We examined the breast feathers of the five species of dippers for barb diameter and spacing. These ...

Some of the brightest colors in nature are created by tiny nanostructures with a structure similar to beer foam or a sponge, according to Yale University researchers. Most colors in nature—from the ...

Researchers at ETH Zurich have created a material traversed by a network of channels the size of micrometres in the same way as the microstructure of a bird's feather. To do so they have developed a ...

Peacocks, perhaps nature's most trippy bird, shake their tail feathers when it's time to attract a new mate. Why? Shaking those feathers — called "train-rattling" — causes an illusion where the ...

An extreme closeup of feathers from a bird with an uncanny ability to hold water while it flies could inspire the next generation of absorbent materials. With high resolution microscopes and 3D ...

The microscopic structure of the feathers of the eastern bluebird, a type of North American thrush, has inspired the creation of a simple-to-produce, scalable and robust novel synthetic material that ...

The color of some feathers on dinosaurs and early birds has been identified for the first time. The research found that the theropod dinosaur Sinosauropteryx had simple bristles -- precursors of ...

This book, about the natural history of feathers, begins with Archaeopteryx. This late-Jurassic (about 150-million-year-old) fossil, something between a reptile and bird, confounded and delighted ...

Blackbirds, it turns out, aren’t actually all that black. Their feathers absorb most of the visible light that hits them, but still reflect between 3 and 5 percent of it. For really black plumage, you ...