Under these drastically changing conditions, the struggle to survive favored the larger birds with deep, strong beaks for opening the hard seeds. Smaller finches with less-powerful beaks perished.

“normal” beaks (examples shown of a petrel and a gull) and a bird with a tactile bill-tip organ (a tinamou, close relative of ostriches and emus and which has an ancestral bill-tip organ ...

Parrots, for example, can use their beaks to help climb; the extra torque helps other birds crack nuts and seeds. “In some ...

Scientists suggest that bigger brains in bird ancestors led to more flexible skulls, playing a key role in their evolution.

Cranial kinesis allows modern birds to eat a wider variety of foods and use their beaks as multifunctional tools.

Whether they evolved for warmth, for display, or served some other function is not ... with their toothed beaks and clawed fingers. Our knowledge of this period of bird evolution is growing ...

Modern birds, along with certain snakes and fishes, have skulls whose jaws and palates are not firmly fixed in place.

In Alaska during the mid-1990s, bird experts noticed an uptick in overgrown, warped beaks among black-capped chickadees. Now, using high-throughput RNA sequencing, researchers at the University of ...

the extra torque helps other birds crack nuts and seeds. "In some ways, the beak functions like a surrogate hand, but being able to move the palate around while eating is also mission critical to ...