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.

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, “super ...

The study analyzed feathers from five birds of paradise species, finding that when viewed from straight ahead, the feathers absorb 99.95% of light, resulting in an incredibly black appearance.

An ordinary black feather from M. lugubris, for example, does not have the spikes and is not angled as much as filaments in superblack feathers from the other species. D. McCoy et al / Nature ...

Black feathers found on other birds-of-paradise—and some found elsewhere on one of the species the team analyzed—reflect between 10 and 100 times more light than the superblack feathers do, ...

The raven-size creature long thought of as the earliest bird, Archaeopteryx, may have been adorned with black feathers, researchers have found. IE 11 is not supported.

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 ...

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 ...

The Microraptor, a pigeon-sized, four-winged dinosaur that lived about 120 million years ago, had feathers with a glossy iridescent sheen. It also had a narrow tail adorned with a pair of streamer ...