Flight feathers are stiff and, because birds can control their positions, act almost like individual wings. The individual feather "branches" (or, more correctly, barbs) have their own barbules ...

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Even thinner barbules branch off from the barbs, and are held together by small hooks that give the feather its shape. What’s much less clear is how the keratin fibres and filaments are ...

On the evening of April 26, 1972, the 61-year-old ornithologist climbed into the back seat of a detective’s car at Bangor ...

The super-black feathers of birds-of-paradise, meanwhile, look very different. Their barbules, instead of lying flat, curve upward. And instead of being smooth cylinders, they are studded in ...

Video of water spreading through the specialized sandgrouse feathers, under magnification, shows the uncoiling and spreading of the feather’s barbules as they become wet.

Individual feathers held the water through a forest of barbules near the shaft, working together with the curled barbules near the tip acting almost like caps. "That's what excited us, to see that ...

The barbules in Namaqua sandgrouse feathers, seen here, uncoil when wet and form a dense web that secures the water. Johns Hopkins University. Since then, ...

But in dry sandgrouse feathers, the inner zone of the feather has barbules that are helically coiled at their base that then straighten out. In the outer zone, the barbules are straight and much ...

Rendered feathers of four common bird species, exhibiting iridescent structural color arising from a variety of nanoscale ...

In the outer zone of the feather, the barbules lack the helical coil and are simply straight. Both parts lack the grooves and hooks that hold the vane of contour feathers together in most other birds.