Ellie Harper

Wild chimpanzees drum. In the rainforests of Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Senegal, Uganda, and Tanzania, they strike the giant root buttresses of trees with their hands and feet, and the hits are not scattered. They land in a spaced-out beat, and each animal’s version of that beat is distinct enough that a researcher can often guess … Read more

There’s a room down there Giant tube worms are living, and apparently breeding, inside fluid-filled pockets sealed under slabs of hardened lava on the seafloor, a layer of the planet nobody had checked for animal life before. The finding comes from a paper published October 15, 2024, in Nature Communications, led by Monika Bright at … Read more

The Claw Where an Antenna Should Be A claw sits exactly where an antenna is supposed to sit on a fossil pulled from Utah’s Wheeler Formation. That claw belongs to Megachelicerax cousteaui, a marine predator just over 3.1 inches (8 cm) long, described from a single specimen and now recognized as the oldest confirmed member … Read more

The Whale That Won’t Get as Big A gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) born in 2020 is projected to grow into an adult about 5 feet 5 inches (1.65 meters) shorter than one born before 2000. For a population that normally matures to 38 to 41 feet (11.6 to 12.5 m), that is a loss of … Read more

The origin story behind every living snake Nearly 4,000 snake species are alive today: vipers, cobras, garter snakes, pythons, boas, sea snakes, the garden variety curled up in a hedge. A 2021 study in Nature Communications, led by Dr. Catherine Klein and Nick Longrich with collaborators from the University of Bath, Bristol, Cambridge, and Germany, … Read more

The worm that rebuilds itself from the middle out Somewhere in the middle of a water nymph worm’s body, a single segment that has spent its whole life doing nothing more glamorous than moving food along suddenly starts building a brain at one end and a tail at the other. This is the water nymph … Read more

Meet Grandmother A ghost shark hauled up from the deep water off New Zealand now carries a Latin name that translates to “grandmother.” In 2024, marine scientist Brittany Finucci at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, working with David Ebert of the Pacific Shark Research Center at San Jose State University, Dominique … Read more

A Two-Foot Toddler with a Cartoon’s Name A newly named dinosaur carries the name of Dooly, South Korea’s best-known cartoon dinosaur, because the fossil behind it really is a baby. Paleontologist Jongyun Jung and colleagues described the species, Doolysaurus huhmini, from a partial skeleton found on Aphae Island, off South Korea’s southwestern coast, in rock … Read more

Two Fins, Two Years, One Killer A dorsal fin turned up alone on a beach on Bering Island, off Russia’s Pacific coast, in August 2022. It was bloodied and scored with tooth marks, the kind of wound whale researchers usually read as the aftermath of an attack. Sergey Fomin, of the Pacific Institute of Geography … Read more

A big blue octopus (Octopus cyanea) will punch a blacktip grouper (Epinephelus fasciatus) that stops pulling its weight during a group hunt on a coral reef. The octopus isn’t fighting over food, it’s correcting a fish that stopped doing its job while the rest of the group keeps working. The Punch Eduardo Sampaio, a behavioral … Read more