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White-chinned jacamar
A white-chinned jacamar (Galbula tombacea). The iridescent shimmer that makes birds such as peacocks and hummingbirds so striking is rooted in an evolutionary tweak in feather nanostructure that has more than doubled the range of iridescent colors birds can display.
[Research supported by U.S. National Science Foundation grants IOS 2029538 and DEB 2112468.]
Learn more in Princeton University news story Birds’ dazzling iridescence tied to nanoscale tweak of feather structure. (Date image taken: 2021; date originally posted to NSF Multimedia Gallery: Jan. 14, 2022)
Credit: Photo by David Ocampo, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University
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