It's a question visitors ask staff all the time at the Smithsonian's National Zoo's Bird House. The answer may surprise you!

The end of a terror bird’s left tibiotarsus, a lower leg bone in birds equivalent to that of a human tibia or shin bone, dates back to the Miocene epoch around 12 ...

Evidence of avian beginnings has been elusive in the fossil record because birds' light, hollow bones rapidly decompose ... This odd, crow-sized creature had long legs and three toes tipped ...

To determine this rate of decline, an international team of paleogenetisicts examined DNA samples from 158 leg bones belonging to three species of Moa, extinct giant birds from New Zealand. The bones ...

These ancient birds were powerful predators that dominated ... A curator at the Museo La Tormenta found the leg bone nearly twenty years ago, but it wasn't until Degrange examined it in 2023 ...