Ellie Harper

The Feet That Ice Built Are Getting Iced Polar bear (Ursus maritimus) foot pads are covered in small bumps built for one job: grip on ice. Now that same surface is collecting something else. Slabs of ice up to a foot across (30 centimeters) are freezing directly onto the skin of the pads, not tangled … Read more

The Sword Dragon of Golden Cap A 10-foot (3-meter) marine reptile that patrolled the seas off what is now Dorset, England, about 183 million years ago has a formal name. In a study published October 9, 2025, in the journal Papers in Palaeontology, paleontologists Dean Lomax, Judy Massare, and Erin Maxwell described it as a … Read more

The number that should be impossible A red-backed shrike weighs 25 to 30 grams (0.9 to 1.1 ounces), about as much as three sheets of paper. Males are easy to pick out: an ash-gray head, a black stripe across the eye like a mask, a chestnut-brown back over pale underparts. Every spring, this small songbird … Read more

Monarch butterflies laid three times as many eggs on aphid-free tropical milkweed as they did on plants crawling with oleander aphids, according to a nursery study out of the University of Florida published in PLOS ONE in July 2023. Bernadette Mach, William Long, Jaret Daniels and Adam Dale ran the experiment in Gainesville, Florida: one … Read more

One Ear, Two Worlds Seals hear equally well in air and underwater. Not “pretty good” in both, not “fine on land and passable at sea”: equally well, according to a study led by Dr. James Rule of the Natural History Museum in London and Monash University, with Dr. Natalie Cooper of the Natural History Museum, … Read more

A Jawbone Older Than Anyone Was Ready to Prove A dog jawbone pulled out of Gough’s Cave in Somerset, England, sometime between 1927 and 1931 belonged to an animal alive roughly 14,300 years ago. A second jawbone, from Pınarbaşı in Türkiye, is older still: about 15,800 years ago. Both have now had their whole genomes … Read more

Ten Thousand Sounds, Zero Audience A bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) living completely alone in a Danish channel was recorded making 10,833 separate sounds over 69 days, between December 8, 2022, and February 14, 2023. The count comes from a study led by cetacean biologist Olga Filatova of the University of Southern Denmark, published in the … Read more

Raise an Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus) chick by hand instead of by wild parents, and it will fly worse on its first trip south. Track it a second time, and you cannot tell it apart from a bird that never spent a day in captivity. Raised by Hand, Flies Like It A team from Ben-Gurion … Read more

The Bite You Didn’t See Coming Half the trained mosquitoes in this study flew straight past a bare hand and landed on one coated in DEET, the chemical that’s supposed to send them the other way. In a study published in the Journal of Experimental Biology on May 15, 2026, Claudio R. Lazzari and four … Read more

The organ that turned out to be a side door Chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus) have an organ humans and other mammals simply don’t: the bursa of Fabricius, a pouch near the tail end of the gut. It was identified as the birthplace of B cells, the white blood cells that produce antibodies, so long ago … Read more