scientists discover the secret behind blue feathers lies inside how the feathers are made. Gavriel Jecan / Corbis For decades, scientists have known how birds with yellow or red feathers usually ...

In the past few decades, ornithologists have noticed some the birds' yellow feathers have mysteriously turned red. (See National Geographic's backyard bird identifier.) At first researchers ...

It’s a colourful puzzle. Blue jays and cardinals get their vivid hues of blue and red, respectively, in different ways – and efforts to understand why may help create coloured displays for ...

What makes a blue jay blue or a cardinal red? Color ... variations in more than 10,000 bird species around the world. How birds make those colorful feathers is the topic Samantha Rutledge ...

They knew that parrots produce psittacofulvins, a type of red ... in the blue birds. In another key experiment, the researchers compared gene expression from feathers of green and yellow versus ...