Super-black feathers on these guys are like looking into a dark cave. Natasha Baucas, CC BY-SA What do birds and aerospace engineers have in common? Both have invented incredibly dark ...

Tilted, microscopic filaments in some of the showy birds’ black feathers make that plumage look much darker than traditional black feathers, researchers report online January 9 in Nature ...

Blackbirds, it turns out, aren’t actually all that black. Their feathers absorb most of the visible light that hits them, but still reflect between 3 and 5 percent of it. For really black ...

But when the male bird faces the camera, things go black—way black. Skip to 2:34 in the video below. This bird’s feathers are so black that you can’t see any of its facial features ...

Plenty of birds have black feathers: crows, ravens, cormorants, the aptly named blackbird. But when it comes to stunningly dark plumage, none of them compare to birds of paradise, a group of 39 ...

Even when coated with vaporized gold, these feathers still appeared black, whereas feathers that derive their black color from pigments looked golden when similarly coated, she adds. The team's ...

A new fossil of a four-winged dinosaur about the size of a pigeon shows he apparently sported quite the costume, complete with glossy black feathers and a tail tipped with a pair of decorative ...