🐦✨ Every bird you've ever seen -- every robin and every pigeon -- is a living dinosaur. 🦖 Why the ancestors of modern birds lived while so many of their relatives died has been a mystery for decades. Two new studies may have the answer.
Feathers are one of the key traits that all birds share. They're made of a protein called keratin, the same material as our fingernails and hair, and birds rely on them to fly, swim, camouflage, attract mates, stay warm, and protect against the sun's rays. But feathers are complex structures that can't be repaired, so as a means of keeping them in good shape, birds shed their feathers and grow replacements in a process called molting.
All baby birds go through successive molts -- periods when they lose the feathers they have and grow in a new set of feathers, before eventually reaching their adult plumage. Molting takes a lot of energy, and losing a lot of feathers at once can make it hard for a bird to keep itself warm.
In modern adult birds, molting usually happens once a year in a sequential process, in which they replace just a few of their feathers at a time over the course of a few weeks. That way, they're still able to fly throughout the molting process.
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