On November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species and transformed our understanding of life on Earth by ...

Confuciusornis was a crow-like fossil bird that lived in the Cretaceous ~120 million years ago. It was one of the first birds to evolve a beak (Fig. 1). Early beak evolution remains understudied.

Few people have the tenacity of ecologists Peter and Rosemary Grant, willing to spend part of each year since 1973 in a tent on a tiny, barren volcanic island in the Galapagos. Even fewer would have ...

A new bird fossil helps scientists better understand convergent evolution of complex anatomy and provides new insights into the evolution of face and beak shape in a forerunner of modern birds.

The beaks of Darwin's medium ground finches can evolve to crush the shells of hard seeds. Credit: Andrew Hendry They say that hindsight is 20/20, and though the theory of ecological speciation—which ...

Bird beaks show how evolution shifts gear, getting to Proxima b, and have physicists made metallic hydrogen? Your browser does not support the audio element. They can ...

A 67-million-year-old bird skull has overturned an established theory about how modern birds evolved. Unlike most modern birds, the flightless group that includes ostriches and emus can’t move their ...

In this Brooklyn Bird Watch, we’ll share some fascinating facts and theories about the life of birds millions of years ago, and stay tuned for follow-up pieces about the current realities of our ...

The past hundred million years or so have not been kind to the dinosaurs. Once formidable “terrible lizards,” their closest modern descendant, is the distinctly unimpressive chicken. Now scientists ...

Confuciusornis was a crow-like fossil bird that lived in the Cretaceous ~120 million years ago. It was one of the first birds to evolve a beak. Early beak evolution remains understudied. Using an ...