Animals are living color. Wasps buzz with painted warnings. Birds shimmer their iridescent desires. Fish hide from predators with body colors that dapple like light across a rippling pond. And all ...

When I was growing up, an albino squirrel briefly took up residence in the large elm tree in front of my home. Spotting the squirrel quickly became an exciting event in the day-to-day life of the ...

The animal world is incredibly colorful, and behind this color palette is a constant game of survival. Most animals use camouflage, covering themselves in stealthy patterns to hide from predators.

A few years ago, Professor Liz Tibbetts stumbled upon something surprising. She noticed that wasps had striking facial features—including fake eyelines and distinctive marks. At the time, people ...

It’s well understood that animals see differently from us humans, but visualizing those differences has proved challenging. However, a group of scientists from the UK and the US have developed a ...

Colors in nature can be produced by both pigments that absorb some light and microscopic structures that change the wavelength of light. Juraj Polak / Getty Images To the untrained eye, most fossils ...

Animals sculpt the optical properties of their tissues at the nanoscale to give themselves “structural colors.” New work is piecing together how they do it. Peacocks, panther chameleons, scarlet ...

Around the world, animals that exhibit rare color morphisms—including lighter-colored variants with albinism or leucism and dark-colored variants with melanism—are often the subject of both veneration ...