Ellie Harper

The Small Animal That Embarrassed a Whole Field The animal that most closely mirrors the human embryo in its first week of development weighs, at most, 3.3 pounds (1,500 grams) and lives in a hutch. In April 2025, a team led by first authors Jesica Romina Canizo and Cheng Zhao, working across the University of … Read more

The Worm That Kept Its Mouth Every living thorny-headed worm is mouthless. The roughly 1,400 described species of Acanthocephala anchor to a host’s gut wall using a retractable, spine-studded proboscis and absorb nutrients directly through their outer body surface, no opening at the front end, no digestive tract behind it. That is the complete anatomy. … Read more

Nineteen Metres of Octopus A 2026 paper in Science by Ikegami et al. places Nanaimoteuthis haggarti at up to 61 ft (18.6 m) in total body length, longer than Mosasaurus hoffmannii, roughly 59 ft (18 m), which has occupied the apex of Cretaceous ocean reconstructions for decades. N. haggarti was a cirrate octopus, the finned … Read more

15,000 Times More Likely to Die, and There Won’t Be a Single Extra Ship By 2100, a free-ranging whale shark (Rhincodon typus) could be up to 15,000 times more likely to be struck and killed by a vessel than it is now. The shipping fleet is not growing by a factor of 15,000. That multiplier … Read more

The Animal That Rests at Peak Hour A Weddell seal (Leptonychotes weddellii) can hold its breath for 96 minutes and reach depths exceeding 2,952 feet (900 meters), and it systematically avoids deploying those capabilities when hunting conditions are best. A 2024 study in Communications Biology, led by Michelle Shero at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution with … Read more

The oldest crocodile relative you’ve never heard of just rewrote the map Eighty million years ago, in what is now Egypt’s Western Desert, a crocodile relative roughly 11 to 13 feet (3.5 to 4 meters) long was already perfecting the marine lifestyle that would eventually let its descendants outlive the dinosaurs. The skull it left … Read more

Half a gram. Gone. A sable shearwater chick on Lord Howe Island, weighing roughly 1.4 lbs (620 g) at fledging, can have its entire reproductive future erased by half a gram of plastic. A 15-year study of the Ned’s Beach colony, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on August 17, 2026, … Read more

The Baleen Whale That Hunted Like a Shark Twenty-six million years ago, off the coast of what is now southeastern Australia, a compact whale measuring approximately 7 feet (2.1 meters) long was hunting individual prey with sharp slicing teeth and large, forward-facing eyes. Its closest modern relatives are blue whales and humpbacks. That is not … Read more

A fishing rod that rewired the spinal cord Vertebrate motor neurons are predictable residents. In every species studied so far, the neurons commanding each fin or limb occupy a characteristic zone in the ventral horn (the anterior region of the spinal cord’s gray matter that governs movement). Dorsal-fin neurons cluster at the ventrolateral zone, the … Read more

Nine Turtles. Three Years. Nobody Left. All nine satellite-tagged yellow-morph green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) tracked inside the Galápagos Marine Reserve stayed there for the entire study, not one crossed into open ocean, despite the expectation that at least some would eventually head west across the Pacific. That finding comes from a study published August … Read more