Our planet’s worst mass extinction event happened 252 million years ago when massive volcanic eruptions caused catastrophic climate change. The vast majority of animal species…
It’s a tough time to be a shark. Pollution, industrialized fishing, and climate change threaten marine life, and the populations of many top ocean predators…
Fluffy rodents twice the size of a gray squirrel survived for tens of thousands of years, and then abruptly disappeared a few thousand years ago…
Recordings of owls’ screeches used to help tell species apart. The Amazon rainforest is teeming with creatures unknown to science—and that’s just in broad daylight….
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…