A robot with bird-like legs that can walk, hop, leap and jump for take-off into flight has been designed in Switzerland in an engineering breakthrough that could enable aircraft to operate in ...

The Wright Brothers studied bird flight before they designed the first airplane. Now modern aircraft fly higher and faster than any bird, yet no manufactured device matches the graceful movements and ...

John Bird, Ph.D., and Afroza Shirin, Ph.D., stand with a model aircraft used in their research on soaring. With a new grant from DARPA, the two are using insights from bird flight to develop uncrewed ...

Assistant Professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering Christina Harvey (front row, right) and Professor Michelle Hawkins, director of the California Raptor Center at the UC Davis School of ...

Kevin Padian is in the Department of Integrative Biology and at the Museum of Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA. Why was the question of the origin of bird flight ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. Most bird species don’t fly above a few thousand feet in ...

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 ...