Small birds have explored a wide variety of styles of flight, ranging from hovering hummingbirds to bounding sparrows to soaring swifts and swallows. A new Cornell University study could explain why.

The path to flight in modern birds was full of forks, twists and dead ends. Erin Malsbury Tens of millions of years of bird evolution guided some of the most important elements of human-powered flight ...

An unassuming metal barn erected recently at the southern edge of the University of California, Davis campus houses some advanced video technology for a uniquely UC Davis project. Leveraging UC Davis’ ...

Insight into bird flight sheds light on the animals’ evolution and provides design inspiration for engineering. Writing in Nature, Harvey et al. 1 report findings that deepen our understanding of some ...

Christina Harvey, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, uses a combination of wind tunnel studies and modeling of inertial forces to understand how birds ...

A tiny, overlooked wrist bone called the pisiform may have played a pivotal role in bird flight and it turns out it evolved far earlier than scientists thought. Fossils from bird-like dinosaurs in ...

It turns out that most modern bird species can manipulate the neutral point to be ahead of or behind the center of gravity by changing the shape of their wings, enabling them to modify their stability ...

In a rectangular room draped in camouflage netting, four Harris’ hawks took turns flying back and forth between grass-covered perches while scientists recorded their every biomechanical flutter. The ...