Twenty-foot-long specimens described as separate species from their cousins, named after mythology’s Hydra. A fossil called Tanystropheus was first described in 1852, and it’s been puzzling…
Cassowaries are big flightless birds with blue heads and dinosaur-looking feet; they look like emus that time forgot, and they’re objectively terrifying. They’re also, along…
Bats do a lot of good for the world — they pollinate plants, they eat disease-carrying insects, and they help disperse seeds that help with…
Bats play a huge but poorly understood role in humans’ lives — they pollinate our crops, eat disease-carrying mosquitos, and carry diseases themselves. But we…
High fish diversity is a good indicator of forest health. Think of the Amazon, and you probably think of jaguars, monkeys, or parrots. But many…
High-tech imaging under UV light shows which parts go where when millipedes mate. Scientists have a pretty good handle on how the birds and the…
One Small Grain of Moon Dust, One Giant Leap for Lunar Studies Back in 1972, NASA sent their last team of astronauts to the Moon…
Hummingbirds are some of the most brightly-colored things in the entire world. Their feathers are iridescent—light bounces off them like a soap bubble, resulting in…
Small Mammals in South America Help Scientists See Forest-Wide Patterns “Save the rainforests” is a snappy slogan, but it doesn’t tell the full story of…
The ancient stardust reveals a “baby boom” in star formation. Stars have life cycles. They’re born when bits of dust and gas floating through space…
At a time when kombucha is commonplace on cafe menus and “probiotic-fortified” has become the newest health buzzword, our guts have never been more relevant….
Deep beneath the ocean’s surface, surprisingly cute warty pink octopuses creep along the seafloor. But not all these octopuses look alike. While we humans love…
Mammals’ backbones are weird. Compared to other four-legged animals like reptiles, mammal spines are a complex mix of sections of differently-shaped bones. Our Frankenstein’s monster…
You’ve probably seen a lichen, even if you didn’t realize it. If you’ve ever meandered through the forest and wondered what the crusty stuff on…
About 466 million years ago, long before the age of the dinosaurs, the Earth froze. The seas began to ice over at the Earth’s poles,…
As issues like climate change, global warming, and renewable energy dominate the national conversation, it’s easy to assume these topics are exclusive to the modern…
There are way more species of horseshoe bats than scientists thought. If you’ve never seen a horseshoe bat, you’re missing out. Their comically large ears…
You probably know Easter Island as “the place with the giant stone heads.” This remote island 2,300 miles off the coast of Chile has long…