page_title: Beak
section_title: Nail
hierarchical_section_title: Beak / Anatomy / Nail
caption_attribution_description: English: Swans at Ruislip Lido.
context_page_description: The beak, bill, and/or rostrum is an external anatomical structure found mostly in birds, but also in non-avian dinosaurs and some mammals. A beak is used for eating and for preening, manipulating objects, killing prey, fighting, probing for food, courtship and feeding young. The terms beak and rostrum are also used to refer to a similar mouth part in some ornithischians, pterosaurs, turtles, cetaceans, dicynodonts, anuran tadpoles, monotremes, sirens, pufferfish, billfishes and cephalopods.
  Although beaks vary significantly in size, shape, color and texture, they share a similar underlying structure. Two bony projections—the upper and lower mandibles—are covered with a thin keratinized layer of epidermis known as the rhamphotheca. In most species, two holes known as nares lead to the respiratory system.
context_section_description: All birds of the family Anatidae (ducks, geese, and swans) have a nail, a plate of hard horny tissue at the tip of the beak. This shield-shaped structure, which sometimes spans the entire width of the beak, is often bent at the tip to form a hook. It serves different purposes depending on the bird's primary food source. Most species use their nails to dig seeds out of mud or vegetation, while diving ducks use theirs to pry molluscs from rocks. There is evidence that the nail may help a bird to grasp things; species which use strong grasping motions to secure their food (such as when catching and holding onto a large squirming frog) have very wide nails. Certain types of mechanoreceptors, nerve cells that are sensitive to pressure, vibration or touch, are located under the nail.
  The shape or color of the nail can sometimes be used to help distinguish between similar-looking species or between various ages of waterfowl. For example, the greater scaup has a wider black nail than does the very similar lesser scaup. Juvenile "grey geese" have dark nails, while most adults have pale nails. The nail gave the wildfowl family one of its former names: "Unguirostres" comes from the Latin ungus, meaning "nail" and rostrum, meaning "beak".
caption: The nail is the black tip of this mute swan's beak.
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