Palaeontologist Steve Brusatte's The Story of Birds offers an excellent and sometimes startling account of bird evolution, ...

Shapes of beaks and snouts come in an extraordinary range of forms, reflecting adaptations to different lifestyles and environments. Yet beneath this diversity lies a paradox: across birds and mammals ...

Over ~100 million years of evolutionary diversification, but mainly the explosive phyletic radiation following the K–Pg extinction event 1, resulted in about 11,000 living bird species (Neornithes) ...

Birds are the only dinosaur lineage that survived until today. About 66 million years ago at the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) boundary, a mass extinction event destroyed all non-avian dinosaurs, ...

A pigeon pecking at crumbs in a city square rarely attracts much attention. It is easy to see it as an ordinary bird, part of ...

A new study has uncovered a fundamental link between brain size and offspring size, helping to solve a long-standing evolutionary puzzle: Why do birds lay such disproportionately large eggs?

A 'one of a kind' fossil discovery could transform our understanding of how the unique brains and intelligence of modern birds evolved, one of the most enduring mysteries of vertebrate evolution. A ...

Birds are represented by 11,000 species and a great variety of body masses. Modular organisation of trait evolution across birds has facilitated simultaneous adaptation of different body regions to ...

A new AI app is helping to rewrite the evolution of flight. The app, developed by researchers from the University of Edinburgh, has been used to analyse footprints made by dinosaurs more than 200 ...