It’s hard to know what prehistoric animals’ lives were like—even answering seemingly simple questions, like what they ate, can be a challenge. Sometimes, paleontologists get…
Genetic analysis shows that reindeer lichens reproduce sexually as opposed to asexually more often than researchers thought. In northern Canada, the forest floor is carpeted…
A small mouse rediscovered on a volcano that erupted 30 years ago provides hope for wildlife conservation in the Philippines. In June 1991, Mount Pinatubo,…
All good things must come to an end. Whether societies are ruled by ruthless dictators or more well-meaning representatives, they fall apart in time, with…
By cutting into fossils and examining growth rings, scientists learned how predatory dinosaurs got so big. Tyrannosaurus rex was one of the biggest meat-eating dinosaurs…
Birds travel across habitats patches to breed, unlike their forest counterparts. Picture the Amazon. You’re thinking lush rainforests teeming with animals, right? It turns out,…
On the night of January 16, 2018, a fireball meteor streaked across the sky over the Midwest and Ontario before landing on a frozen lake…
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….