Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. Beauty, they say, is in the eye of the beholder. Well, if ...

Bird tails are complex structures that give us clues about bird flight and bird behavior. Knowing the variety of tail patterns helps us to identify birds, so let's talk bird tails. A bird's tail ...

About 115 million years ago, a teenage bird with spotted, ribbonlike tail feathers flew around the trees of the supercontinent Gondwana, until it perished and fossilized in what is now northeastern ...

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Scientists have ...

If you had to describe a male peacock’s tail feathers, you might pick words like “dazzling” or “beautiful.” You probably wouldn’t go with “stealthy,” “aerodynamic,” or “subtle.” Peacock tails are just ...

The fossil remains of an ancient bird with a stomach full of seeds and a tail like a dinosaur's have been unearthed from a province in China famed as one of the richest treasure troves of the dinosaur ...

In the hotly debated matter of bird-tail aerodynamics, the first wind tunnel measurements indicate that the prevailing theory may be wrong. The basic avian tail has the triangular shape of supersonic ...

A 115-million-year-old fossilized bird with a pair of long, ribbon-like tail feathers is the oldest bird ever found in Brazil. It was about the size of a hummingbird, and it likely boasted bright ...

A pigeon-sized dinosaur that lived more than 100 million years ago sported four ribbon-like tail feathers that likely helped the creature balance on tree branches. That picture comes from a fossil of ...

An artistic rendering of the early Cretaceous era fukuipteryx prima, a dino-bird with a tail feather-supporting skeleton, which was discovered by researchers in central Japan. (Masanori Yoshida) (CN) ...

"We've never seen this combination of different kinds of tail feathers before in a fossil bird," says Jingmai O'Connor, a paleontologist at Chicago's Field Museum and one of the study's authors. "This ...