Ellie Harper

The Fact: A Mummy That Shouldn’t Exist A mummified cub of Homotherium latidens, the scimitar-toothed cat, has come out of Siberian permafrost with its fur, muscle, and paws still on it. Radiocarbon dating places the cub somewhere between 31,808 and 37,019 years old, a range the team that studied it treats as the honest answer … Read more

HEADLINE: New monkey species Colobus congoensis identified from 114 photos, no specimen ARTICLE: Between 2018 and 2022, patrol teams working the rainforest between the Lomami and Congo (Lualaba) rivers in east-central Democratic Republic of Congo photographed the same unfamiliar monkey 114 times. Nobody ever trapped one. Nobody ever brought one into a lab. The entire … Read more

3,300 Feet Off Florida, Something That Wasn’t Supposed to Be There On June 30, 2019, a jellyfish the size of a shot glass came up in a suction sampler off the Florida coast, pulled from 3,300 feet (999 meters) above the Blake Escarpment by the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Deep Discoverer, working NOAA’s Windows to … Read more

Mice at Four Miles Up Thirteen mummified leaf-eared mice (Phyllotis vaccarum) have been pulled from the summits of three Andean volcanoes, nearly 4 miles above sea level, in country that looks more like Mars than anywhere else on the planet. The finds came from Salín, nearly 19,800 feet (6,029 m), Púlar, over 20,400 feet (6,233 … Read more

The Fact: Seals Are Picky About Ice A harbor seal (Phoca vitulina) in Johns Hopkins Inlet, Alaska, does not climb onto the nearest floating iceberg. It picks one that matches the job it has that month. Lynn Kaluzienski, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alaska Southeast working with U.S. National Park Service collaborators, tracked … Read more

The World’s Oldest Octopus Just Stopped Being an Octopus Pohlsepia mazonensis is not an octopus. For 25 years, this 310-million-year-old fossil, a nodule roughly 3.1 inches (80 mm) long and 2 inches (50 mm) wide pulled from the Mazon Creek deposits of northeastern Illinois and held at the Field Museum in Chicago as specimen PE51727, … Read more

A greyhound with scales, 215 million years old Galahadosuchus jonesi ran on long, slender legs across dry ground 215 million years ago, built more like a greyhound than anything you would call a crocodile. Ewan Bodenham, a PhD researcher at the Natural History Museum in London and University College London, has formally named it as … Read more

The Shark That Wasn’t Supposed to Be There In January 2025, a baited camera dropped by Alan Jamieson’s team hit the seafloor 1,608 feet (490 meters) down, off Antarctica’s South Shetland Islands, in water sitting at a near-freezing 34.29°F (1.27°C). A shark crossed into frame: 10 to 13 feet (3 to 4 meters) long, gliding … Read more

Two 9-Second Glances: What a Cat Learns Before You’ve Finished a Sentence Thirty-one cats sat in front of a screen at Azabu University in Kanagawa, Japan, and needed only about four trials, two 9-second looks at a single image, to link it to a word that meant absolutely nothing. That’s roughly 18 seconds of exposure … Read more

The Encore Nobody Was Listening For African lions do not stop at one roar. A study of 3,149 recorded vocalizations found that every full-throated roar is followed, without fail, by a second, quieter call, a pattern that went unnoticed for as long as anyone has been recording lions. The team, led by Jonathan Growcott, a … Read more