Ellie Harper

HEADLINE: Megalodon was a slender 24.3-meter cruiser, not a bulky great white ARTICLE: Megalodon was not a supersized great white shark. According to a 2025 study led by paleontologist Kenshu Shimada at DePaul University, the ancient giant shark, Otodus megalodon, had a long, slender build closer to a lemon shark than to the barrel-chested predator … Read more

The Handstand Pee A male Amazon river dolphin rolls onto his back, lifts his penis clear of the water, and fires a jet of urine into the air, sometimes arcing it toward another male’s snout. Zoologist Claryana Araújo-Wang and colleagues from the Botos do Cerrado Research Project in Brazil and the CetAsia Research Group in … Read more

One Season’s Fat, Burned in a Single Migration A southern hemisphere humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) can lose about 36% of its body condition on a single round trip between its Antarctic feeding grounds and its breeding grounds in Colombia. That number comes from a team led by Alexandre Bernier-Graveline, a PhD candidate at Griffith University, … Read more

Five Orcas, One Liver, No Survivors Off the southern Gulf of California, near La Paz in Baja California Sur, killer whales (Orcinus orca) hunt juvenile great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias), flip them onto their backs, and eat exactly one organ before swimming away from the rest of the body. Marine biologist Erick Higuera Rivas, of … Read more

A dolphin can exhale plastic Eleven wild bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) had their breath tested, and eleven came back positive for microplastics. Every animal, five living in Sarasota Bay, Florida, and six in Barataria Bay, Louisiana, exhaled at least one plastic particle from its blowhole. Miranda Dziobak of the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program led the … Read more

A New Species Found Without a New Frontier In 2022, biologist R. Alexander Pyron of George Washington University and three co-authors, Kyle A. O’Connell, Jennifer Y. Lamb, and David A. Beamer, published the formal description of a new salamander in the journal Zootaxa. They named it Desmognathus pascagoula, a swamp-dwelling amphibian found only in the … Read more

A horse can smell fear before you say a word Domestic horses that spent a few minutes with nothing but sweat odor from frightened people became jumpier and more reluctant to be touched, even though they never saw a scared face or heard a shaking voice. A study published in PLOS One on January 14, … Read more

A Coral-Crowned Corpse on the Ceiling The spider was dead, upside down on the ceiling, and dressed in something that looked like a sprig of white coral. A BBC Winterwatch crew filming inside a disused gunpowder store at Castle Espie, in County Down, Northern Ireland, found it there in 2021, spotted by WWT volunteer Jonathan … Read more

The Blink That Won an Award A secretary bird catches a locust, and as it swallows, its eye turns into a smooth blue ball. Not a blink. Not a squint. A translucent membrane balloons up over the eyeball like a marble dropped into the socket, too fast to see without a high-speed shutter. Biologist and … Read more

The Monkeys Whose Reaction Saved Them Some capuchins reacted harder, and it saved them Between 2008 and 2013, a wild population of white-faced capuchin monkeys (Cebus capucinus) at the Lomas Barbudal Biological Reserve in Costa Rica went through six years of the ordinary kind of drought: dry seasons that made food scarcer but killed almost … Read more