A woodpecker may not make a good football mascot, but Mississippi State University researchers think this bird’s shock-absorbing beak may help them design a better football helmet. Lakiesha Williams, ...
A bird beak is the most important resource it has, and every species has one solely designed for survival. Birds use beaks for just about everything: building nests, feeding their young, cleaning ...
We get captivated by a bird’s plumage and may not think to notice its beak, which is critical to the bird’s identity. I’ve often heard people yell “flamingo!” when they see a pink-plumed bird feeding ...
Look at a bird’s beak to see what family the bird belongs to and the kind of food it eats. Seeing a bird with a long, needlelike beak would tell us it’s in the hummingbird family that probes flowers ...
Bird beaks come in almost every shape and size—from the straw-like beak of a hummingbird to the slicing, knife-like beak of an eagle. We have found, however, that this incredible diversity is ...
This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. Scientists already knew that birds evolved ...
Now, researchers have discovered that an iconic bird that inspired the likes of Charles Darwin bore the very first beak. The team reconstructed the ancient beaks of Ichthyornis dispar in a study ...
Researchers in Anchorage are working to crack a tough nut in the form of a beak deformity affecting a large portion of black-capped chickadees and other birds in parts of Alaska, including the Kenai ...
As Charles Darwin showed nearly 150 years ago, bird beaks are exquisitely adapted to the birds' feeding strategy. A team of mathematicians and engineers has now explained exactly how some shorebirds ...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska --Biologist Colleen Handel saw her first black-capped chickadee with the heartrending disorder in 1998. The tiny birds showed up at birdfeeders in Alaska’s largest city with ...
A CT-scan image of the skull of an ancient bird shows how one of the earliest bird beaks worked as a pincer, in the way beaks of modern birds do, but also had teeth left over from dinosaur ancestors.