For centuries, scientists have observed that animals in warmer climates have longer limbs—a pattern known as Allen's Rule. Long attributed to the need to maintain body temperature, the precise ...

It has taken more than 20 years to extract, assemble and interpret a mysterious find from a famed marble quarry about 50 miles north of Milan, Italy. Now, with the investigation finally complete, ...

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 ...

In a rectangular room draped in camouflage netting, four Harris’s hawks took turns flying back and forth between grass-covered perches while scientists recorded their every biomechanical flutter. The ...

Fossils reveal that prehistoric cicadas’ wings evolved to help them evade hungry predators with feathers and beaks, scientists say. By Jack Tamisiea Today, few critters are as abundant as cicadas.

Scientists built a working model of an early winged dinosaur to test a hypothesis about how the appendages evolved. By Asher Elbein The origin of bird wings has long presented a puzzle to ...

Geographic and phylogenetic sampling of avian wing-bone morphology. Using measurements from 7366 skeletal specimens, we analyze variation in wing-bone length across 1520 bird species, representing ...