Quick Take Vulturine guinea fowl’s blue and white plumage comes from feather structure, not pigments, creating vivid, long-distance visual signals. Bright colors and high-contrast patterns help birds ...

A tree-dwelling bird that lived 48 million years ago probably had blue plumage, researchers say. Scientists inspecting a fossil of Eocoracias brachyptera say they have, for the first time, identified ...

What makes a blue jay blue or a cardinal red? Color, a crucial element in nature, is most evident in the amazing hue and pattern variations in more than 10,000 bird species around the world. How birds ...

Melanosomes linked with blue feathers are much longer than they are wide Sven Traenkner/Senckenberg Research Institute and Nature Museum in Frankfurt A prehistoric Eocoracias brachyptera bird whose ...

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 ...

Some birds are iridescent because of the physical make-up of their feathers, but scientists had never found evidence of this structural color in the group of birds containing ostriches and cassowaries ...