Non-verbal gestures are an integral part of how humans and some other organisms communicate, as with various sign languages  and expressing emotions. A small-bird species called the Japanese tit (Parus minor) also may also use this more complex form of ...

Despite their reputation for being easy for aspiring plant parents to destroy, orchids can be found all over the planet. There are more than 25,000 known species of these plants, with more discovered every year. An international team of scientists ...

The idea that most biologically male members of a species are physically larger than the females goes back to Charles Darwin’s 1871 book The Descent of Man. While this is typically true for some species including gorillas, buffalo, and elephants, ...

It was a mosquito full of dinosaur blood and encased in amber that helped bring the fictional Jurassic Park to life. While real world bugs stuck in sticky substances don’t lead to dangerous dinosaur parks (yet), they do offer scientists ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

Baleen whales, including today’s blue, humpback, and fin whales rely on sounds to live in their watery world. Their songs must be able travel far in the murky, dark ocean so that they can find their kin and migrate hundreds ...