Steve Zack is coordinator of Bird Conservation for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Thanksgiving is upon us, as families and friends gather for food, drink and conversation.

An air-filled sac within the birds' lungs is believed to increase the force the birds use to power flight muscles while soaring. Soaring birds -- like osprey, eagles, falcons, even vultures -- can ...

New theory on origin of birds: Enlarged skeletal muscles Date: July 2, 2011 ... Dr. Newman, a professor of cell biology and anatomy, studies the diversity of life and how it got that way.

The trouble was that most biologists do not describe animal anatomy in engineering-friendly terms. ... But with a five-jointed muscle network, a bird does not have to signal each muscle independently.

Archaeopteryx doesn’t have several features considered essential to flight in modern birds, such as a keeled breastbone to which several important flight muscles attach; a ball-and-socket ...

Thanksgiving is upon us, as families and friends gather for food, drink and conversation. The latter can be fraught with risk, of course — politics and religion have long been out of the question, and ...