Aircraft need powerful engines, jet or propeller driven, to deliver the thrust required to enable their wings to generate ...

The vane on the leading edge — or “forward,” in the direction of a bird’s flight — is narrower and the fibers are generally ...

Instead, the structure of birds' wings and the muscles involved mean air is always pushed backwards, propelling the birds forward. With hummingbirds, however, that's not the case.

If you decide to clip your pet bird’s wings, the good news is that they will grow back. The bad news is that it’ll take some ...

Figure 1 | Air sacs minimize the energy soaring birds need for wing muscles. Schachner et al. 1 investigated the role of air sacs (called the subpectoral diverticula) in bird flight.

Birds such as terns, swifts, ducks, falcons and sandpipers have high-speed wings that are long and pointed, allowing them to maintain rapid flight and maneuver quickly to capture prey.

But as bird ancestors increasingly took wing, Clarke says, the development of powerful flapping chest muscles in birds shifted their center of mass toward the front of the body. In order to ...

Birds such as terns, swifts, ducks, falcons and sandpipers have high-speed wings that are long and pointed, allowing them to maintain rapid flight and maneuver quickly to capture prey.

Geographic and phylogenetic sampling of avian wing-bone morphology. Using measurements from 7366 skeletal specimens, we analyze variation in wing-bone length across 1520 bird species, representing ...

Kakapos are large, flightless parrots native to New Zealand. These birds can’t fly because they have short wings and lack a keel on their breastbone, where other birds have their flight muscles.

These birds lay their eggs on the ground, ... "As they grow, the very last thing to develop in the rails is the pectoral muscles and the wing muscles," Hume said. RELATED STORIES ...

How dinosaurs were built to fly. Like feathers, most of the other traits needed for flight also evolved long before the first birds. Scientists believe many of these features appeared at various ...