New research confirms that modern birds retain many ancient instincts inherited from their dinosaur ancestors. From complex ...

Modern birds capable of flight all have a specialized wing structure called the propatagium without which they could not fly. The evolutionary origin of this structure has remained a mystery, but ...

Since the 1960s, fossil discoveries have confirmed the scientific consensus that birds evolved from the group of predatory ...

Birds are the only group of dinosaurs that survived the asteroid-induced mass extinction 66 million years ago. But not all the birds alive at the time made it. Why the ancestors of modern birds ...

Second, in modern birds, the forebrain is massive relative to the rest of the brain; in pre-modern birds and near-bird dinosaurs like Velociraptor, these areas are proportionally much smaller.

In modern birds, such behavior helps them to conserve body heat; it likely served a similar purpose for maniraptoran dinosaurs that also curled up at bedtime, according to the study.

Fossil ‘overturns more than a century of knowledge about origin of modern birds’ Each of the roughly 11,000 species of birds on Earth today is classified into one of two groups, based on the ...

The first birds diverged from two-legged theropod dinosaurs around 165 million to 150 million years ago, during the Jurassic period, according to a 2015 paper in the journal Current Biology.They ...

Scientists uncovered a 149-million-year-old bird fossil in southeastern China with unexpectedly modern traits they believe could rewrite the evolutionary history of birds. The recently discovered ...