Paleontologists have been debating for decades whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded, like modern mammals and birds, or cold-blooded, like modern reptiles. Knowing whether dinosaurs were warm-…
Scientific names get chosen for lots of reasons — they can honor an important person, or hint at what an organism looks like or where…
Its close cousin Baryonyx probably swam too, but Suchomimus might’ve waded like a heron. Spinosaurus is the biggest carnivorous dinosaur ever discovered—even bigger than T….
Approximately 80 miles from the westernmost reach of China’s Great Wall, paleontologists found relics of an even more ancient world. Over the last two decades,…
A wide variety of animals have tusks, from elephants and walruses to five-pound, guinea pig-looking critters called hyraxes. But one thing tusked animals have in…
In Star Trek, characters carry a little handheld device called a tricorder that they can point at objects to analyze and identify them. When the show’s…
“Mystery plant” from the Amazon declared a new species after nearly 50 years of flummoxing scientists. In 1973, a scientist stumbled upon a strange tree…
The trillions of bacteria living in our guts play a crucial role in our ability to digest food and fight off disease. All other animals…
Redesignating an endangered subspecies as a separate species could help it get protected. Picture a skunk. You’re probably thinking of a stocky animal, around the…
Blood-sucking flies may be following chemicals produced by skin bacteria to locate bats to feed on. We humans aren’t the only animals that have to…
The Xerces blue butterfly was last seen flapping its iridescent periwinkle wings in San Francisco in the early 1940s. It’s generally accepted to be extinct,…
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,…
