One obvious reason why people enjoy the existence of birds so much is their bright and varied colors. Humans — and most mammals — seem boring in comparison. But why are birds the colors that they are?

Quick Take Vulturine guinea fowl’s blue and white plumage comes from feather structure, not pigments, creating vivid, ...

Feathers on 37 of 45 birds-of-paradise species emit biofluorescence. The feathers absorb UV light and release it as a ...

Birds tend to be more colorful in the tropics, and scientists wanted to find out how they got there: if colorful feathers evolved in the tropics, or if tropical birds have brightly-colored ancestors ...

Why are some songbirds so brightly colored? A new study finds that a hidden layer of black and white feathers help their colors pop. Have you ever looked at a bird and wondered, how can it be so red ...

Beautiful bird plumage these days matches the color pallet of wildflowers — cardinals as red as Indian paintbrushes, andbluebirds as blue as bluebonnets. It’s not happenstance. Wildflowers attract ...

If you’ve ever walked through a snowy mountain landscape and felt as though something were watching you, only to see nothing ...

Simon Griffith receives funding from the Australian Research Council. Birds are perhaps the most colourful group of animals, bringing a splash of colour to the natural world around us every day.

It took 150 million years for feathered dinosaurs to master flight and become the birds we see overhead today. By 125 million years ago, the Mesozoic skies were full of birds. But many of them were ...