Ellie Harper 
A 7-Meter Predator, Caught Mid-Bite Joaquinraptor casali was a megaraptorid, part of a group of large, clawed, meat-eating theropod dinosaurs known mostly from South America, and it measured more than 23 feet (7 m) long while weighing over 2,200 pounds (1,000 kg). Paleontologists Lucio Ibiricu, of Argentina’s Patagonian Institute of Geology and Paleontology, and Matthew … Read more
A pea-sized amphibian that hunted like a chameleon Nabia civiscientrix measured under 2 inches (5 centimeters) long, small enough that one of the type fossils was photographed sitting on a one-cent coin for scale. Its skull anatomy, according to the team that described it, suggests it caught insects with a projectile tongue, the same ballistic … Read more
An undescribed species of squid, filmed almost 13,450 feet (4,100 meters) down in the Pacific, buried nearly its entire body upside down in the mud and left only its siphon and two stiff tentacles poking above the sediment, arranged to look exactly like the glass sponges growing around it. The sighting The animal turned up … Read more
The Contest Nobody Expected Her to Win Ronan, a 16-year-old California sea lion (Zalophus californianus) at UC Santa Cruz’s Long Marine Laboratory, now keeps a snare-drum beat more precisely than every one of ten human college students tested against her, at every tempo tried. Comparative neuroscientist Peter Cook (New College of Florida and UC Santa … Read more
The Shark With No Fixed Color The blue shark (Prionace glauca) might not be blue in the way anyone assumed, and it might not stay blue for long. Researchers at the City University of Hong Kong dissected the skin of this species and found something inside its dermal denticles, the tiny tooth-like scales that cover … Read more
Two in Three Cats Have a Side Of 408 YouTube videos showing cats asleep or resting, roughly two out of three cats came down on their left side. That is not a coin flip. Behavioral neuroscientist Onur Güntürkün of Ruhr University Bochum, working with researchers from the University of Bari Aldo Moro, Medical School Hamburg, … Read more
The reptile that spent a century in two museums, in two pieces, under two roofs Sphenodraco scandentis lived in the Solnhofen Archipelago of what is now Germany more than 145 million years ago, in the Late Jurassic. It was a rhynchocephalian, a lizard-like reptile related to lizards but not one of them. For close to … Read more
Put an adult female common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus) in a cage with two bats she has never met, seal the three of them in together for seven days, then release all three into a shared space packed with more than twenty other bats. Nine weeks later, she is still grooming those same two strangers … Read more
Something in Less Than a Millimeter of Eye A deep-sea fish larva just 0.2 inches (half a centimeter) long, with eyes smaller than 0.04 inches (under a millimeter) across, is carrying a type of eye cell that no vertebrate has ever been shown to have. In February 2026, a team led by Dr. Fabio Cortesi, … Read more
The Hell Heron of Jenguebi A newly named dinosaur pulled from the Sahara Desert in Niger turns out to have died as a juvenile at roughly 26 feet (8 m) long. Spinosaurus mirabilis, described by a 20-person team led by Paul Sereno, a professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago, in … Read more
