Sentences with phrase «birds as their feathers»

That's the name given to birds as their feathers ignite, mid-air, after flying through a concentrated beam of sunlight.

Not exact matches

Since its 1861 discovery in Bavaria, just a few years after the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, most scientists have placed Archaeopteryx at the root of the broad group of proto - birds, known as Avialae, from which our avian feathered friends emerged.

Birds of a feather, OK, but as long as people of other ethnic backgrounds are allowed in it really isn't segregated.

Rand and LaVey are, as LaVey apparently admitted, birds of a feather.

Archaeopteryx, along with the well developed record of feathered dinosaurs and very early birds, provides a wonderful example of transitional features within extinct forms bridging those features present in extant forms, just as evolution predicts they should.

It's as unnatural and ludicrous as turkeys voting for Christmas, or birds tying stones to their feathers and walking into the sea.

Okay, Dad gets a bit pis sed... often... but that was the past... (well, He's gonna be pis sed in the future here soon if the FoxNews Christians get their way)... I mean really, my child, what kind of God am I if something humans do can ruffle my feathers... well, the Bird gets pretty pis sed as well... he's a puffy mess right now, actually... Somebody clean the mess of feather and poop up please... sorry... where was I...

Down at Cape Canaveral small birds with feathers get almost as much attention as the moon rockets

All I hope is that he continues to be excellent, stays healthy, gets as many rings as he can, and that he does it all in dirty bird feathers!!

But over the course of the week, I watched as the circle around each of those «bouquets» grew to include rocks that Annabel had brought up from the bottom of the lake, a little bit of loose moss from Adelaide's walk in the woods, and the bluejay feathers that Ezra found on the ground (after watching a majestic eagle swoop down to capture that beautiful bird).

We have written a few programs centered around our feathered friends such as «Bird Talk», «Father of the Year», and «Who's Hiding in the Haven» to name a few.

Take a closer at birds while learning to use binoculars as we search the forest and wetlands for these feathered friends.

I expect these two birds of a feather to join forces in a more definitive way as autumn leaves begin to fall.

«The best explanation is that the long stiff feathers, which originated in this group of dinosaurs and were similar to modern bird feathers, could perform equally well as social signals when compared to the bony displays in T. rex or Dilophosaurus,» Gates surmises.

The new findings join previous reports of potentially symbolic Neandertal artifacts, such as a possible necklace made from eagle claws (SN: 4/18/15, p. 7) and bird - feather decorations.

Using feather length as a proxy for nutritional status in birds, the researchers were able to rule out the possibility that smaller birds were less well nourished than their ancestors.

From parrot to peacock, a bird's feathers say a lot about it, but a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that their plumage also may serve as a record of air pollution.

On dinosaurs, as on modern birds, feathers could have served a variety of purposes, providing lift or maneuverability during flight; a means of sending signals to other members of its species, including those of the opposite sex; or insulating against the cold.

A less bird - obsessed man might have quailed, but Prum re-emerged with a string of discoveries that have reshaped the field's understanding of such fundamental questions as what feathers are for and how mating rituals drive avian evolution.

If we think a particular process is responsible for the origin of feathers, we could rerun that process, changing the developmental pathway in the bird embryo as a way to test our proposed evolutionary pathway.

Unlike other birds that travel over the sea, such as albatrosses, their feathers lack waterproof oil, so they can't take a break on the water.

Such disorder in nature's structural color (versus pigments) has shown up before, as in obviously jumbled color - trick structures in bird feathers.

These tiny bits are the same size and shape as the pigment - bearing structures (called melanosomes) found in the skin and scales of modern - day lizards and in the feathers of birds.

If it's unusually cold, for example, there may not be as many plants or insects to eat, and baby birds may freeze because they haven't grown feathers to protect them from the cold.

The team found bird feathers in a substantial number of their 14,000 samples, as much as 70 % during peak autumn migration.

At Copan, to the south, for example, fifth - century mourners dressed their dead queen in burial garments shimmering with precious greenstone beads, shell ornaments and feathered bird heads, and they laid her to rest on a massive carved funerary slab in what is known today as the Margarita Tomb.

With the skeleton of a dinosaur and the feathers of a bird, Archaeopteryx has long been hailed as marking the transition from dinosaurs to birds.

Like all modern paleontologists, Therrien was acquainted with the spectacular feathered - dinosaur fossils of the Liaoning beds in China, where the idea that dinosaurs are the ancestors of birds got its biggest boost, thanks to the preservation of feathers — both the thread - like ones known as «dinofuzz» and the more familiar shafted kind — in the silky mud of an ancient lake bottom.

The feather shares characteristics with the plumage that helps modern birds fly, such as longer barbs on one side of the feather's shaft than the other.

Previous research has shown that the food consumed by a bird, as well as its general well - being, can influence the colour of its feathers.

The Swiss researchers have demonstrated that, when EDA is malfunctioning in lizards, they fail to develop a proper scale placode, exactly as mammals or birds affected with similar mutations in that same gene can not develop proper hairs or feathers placodes.

For a century and a half, the 150 - million - year - old feathered creature called Archaeopteryx has reigned as the earliest known bird and as a symbol of the link between ancient dinosaurs and living fowl.

Fossils are not the only source of clues to the evolution of feathers; bird embryos are as well.

«We know that large feathers appeared even earlier in the lineage leading to birds, as did brightly colored plumage.

Some birds are so intelligent that they're informally referred to as «primates with feathers.»

It has been suggested that the bird can not be counted as a species in its own right, as this lone feather could just an abnormality from a crested argus.

The study, published in the journal Current Biology, shows that the familiar anatomical features of birds — such as feathers, wings and wishbones — all first evolved piecemeal in their dinosaur ancestors over tens of millions of years.

To Norell, it's important to read these as feathers all over the body because the major thrust of his work as a scientist is to show that dinosaurs are direct ancestors of modern birds.

His cataloguing of the unusual and sometimes bizarre varieties of pigeon was more than a hobby: he was an avid pigeon breeder, and devoted many pages of On The Origin of Species to documenting how readily the birds change their form when selected for unusual traits such as webbed or feathered feet.

Contrary to their portrayal in popular films, dinosaurs are now widely accepted by scientists as having been covered in feathers, possibly in a range of colors, much like the colorful plumage of modern birds, which are a living dinosaur lineage.

The find makes Jeholornis unique, as it combines an ancestral long tail with a fan of feathers at its base that resembles the tail feathers of modern birds, says Zhonghe Zhou of the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology in Beijing.

As birds swing their wings upward, the feathers separate like window blinds to let air through, which prevents the lift - reducing currents that the bats experienced, the researchers say.

Nevertheless, it is still early days for this research: Although the researchers were able to determine, by the concentration of copper and other elements, that the feathers of fossil birds such as Confuciusornis had darker and lighter areas, they are not yet able to tell what colors these represent.

This is a new mechanism for giving feathers a blue color, the authors say; similar nanofibers are found in the blue skin of other birds, such as Emus, but those fibers are made of collagen.

Although the best evidence for feathers has been found in a group of meat - eating dinosaurs dating back to about 150 million years ago, and from which birds apparently evolved at about the same time, there have been sightings of bristly, filamentous structures in very distantly related plant - eating dinosaurs as well.

The team discovered that the vibrant light from the breast feathers selectively activates different photoreceptors in the female birds» eyes as the colors change.

But the past decade or two of research, which is marked by the discovery of thousands of specimens of early birds and flying dinosaurs, also shows that feathers were an early evolutionary innovation — even if they probably arose for reasons unrelated to powered flight, such as insulation or sexual display.

And as part of the international team that recently published full genomes of 48 birds in Science magazine, Greenwold and Sawyer showed that the number of scale, claw and feather beta - keratin genes is highly variable among all birds.

Christian, who led the study as part of his research degree (MRes) in Vertebrate Palaeontology, adds: «Our results indicate that the number, and the relative thickness, of layers around the circumference of the rachis and along the feather's length are not fixed, and may vary either in order to cope with the stresses of flight particular to the bird or to the lineage that the individual belongs to.»

New research shows that cuckoos have striped or «barred» feathers that resemble local birds of prey, such as sparrowhawks, that may be used to frighten birds into briefly fleeing their nest in order to lay their parasitic eggs.