Dinosaur fossils get most of the hype, but uncovering plant fossils is crucial for understanding the long-gone ecosystems of the past. In a plant find that’s definitely worth the buzz, a team of researchers have found the oldest known fossilized ...
Read More »Newly discovered deep-sea worm moves like a ‘living magic carpet’
The planet’s deep-sea worms survive and thrive in some pretty inhospitable places. Some are bioluminescent, glowing in regions too deep for the sun’s powerful rays to shine. Other sea worms can live surrounded by methane, one of the Earth’s most ...
Read More »Take a look inside 13,000 animals–no scalpel required
If dissecting a frog in biology class had you begging to be sent home, new 3D scans of thousands of vertebrate species are here to help by letting you peek at animal insides without the mess. The newly completed openVertebrate (oVert) project ...
Read More »Meet the new king of the ‘living fossils’
If you take a look at a horseshoe crab, you are essentially peering back in time millions of years. Animals like horseshoe crabs, coelacanths, and the duck-billed platypus are what Charles Darwin called “living fossils” since alive specimens show very ...
Read More »Orca observed hunting and killing a great white shark by itself for the first time
When their kin aren’t attacking boats and porpoises or monitoring their large adult sons, some pods of orca whales are also known to attack the fearsome great white shark. Groups of these marine mammals are known to hunt and kill ...
Read More »Watch: Three bald eagles could hatch any day now
All eyes are on two new avian internet celebrities and their cozy home in Southern California. Three bald eagle chicks could hatch any day now from their nest atop a Jeffrey pine tree overlooking Big Bear Lake in the San ...
Read More »Why we don’t have tails
It has been an enduring evolutionary mystery since the days of Charles Darwin: When did humans lose their tails? Apes–including humans and chimpanzees–are all primates who do not have long tails like lemurs and our other monkey relatives. Thanks to ...
Read More »Jellyfish-inspired glowing dye can glom onto fingerprints at crime scenes
Imagine a crime scene. Chances are, you’re also imagining someone dusting for fingerprints. Despite recent debates of whether fingerprint evidence is accurate and reliable, it can still prove extremely useful in certain situations, such as narrowing down potential suspect lists. ...
Read More »Why are there so many snakes?
In a square-rectangle sort of way, snakes are technically lizards, but for semantics’ sake and because snakes are so distinctive, biologists separate snakes and lizards into different categories. Despite being nested within the same branch of the tree of life, ...
Read More »You might have more in common with the sea lamprey than you realize
As the adage goes, you can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your relatives. This even applies to your distant evolutionary cousins. In terms of a very specific genetic function, humans are a little bit more closely related to ...
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