The Number At a rabies vaccination clinic that moved through nine villages in Tanzania’s Mara region, a smartphone app correctly flagged 98.9% of the domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) that had never been vaccinated, using nothing but a photo of each dog’s face. It also recognized 76.2% of the dogs that had already been vaccinated. … Read more
The Dinosaur With a Dragon’s Mouth A 150-million-year-old Archaeopteryx fossil just revealed something no specimen of its kind has shown before: the soft-tissue outline of tooth-like bumps lining the roof of its mouth, a tiny bone that points to a flexible tongue, and a cluster of unusually nerve-dense openings near the tip of its jaw. … Read more
The tooth with three points Every surviving tooth of Threordatoth chasmatos carries three separate points, a shape that shows up in no other procolophonid, a group of small, lizard-like reptiles from the Triassic, except for one close relative from the same quarry, Hwiccewyrm trispiculum. Dr. Luke Meade and colleagues, including Dr. Marc Jones, curator of … Read more
The fact that shouldn’t be true Kidney disease is the single biggest killer of captive polar bears (Ursus maritimus), and the bears who get it die roughly 10 years earlier than the ones who don’t. That’s the finding of a 2021 review in Zoo Biology led by Charlie Robbins, founder of the Washington State University … Read more
Two Orcas, One Fjord, and a Very Long Kiss In October 2024, citizen-scientist snorkelers in Norway’s Kvænangen fjords, about 68 miles (109 kilometers) northeast of Tromsø, filmed two wild orcas (Orcinus orca) doing something nobody had caught on camera in the open ocean before. The pair pressed mouth to mouth and gently nibbled each other’s … Read more
The Biggest Terror Bird Ever Found Is Known From One Shin Bone, and Something Bigger Ate It One Bone, One Giant Bird A single fossil fragment, the lower end of a left tibiotarsus (the fused shin-and-ankle bone in a bird’s leg), turned up in Colombia’s Tatacoa Desert and has been identified as a Phorusrhacid, the … Read more
The arm checks first A male California two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides) has a mating arm that will not do its job until it has tasted something first. The arm is the hectocotylus, a modified third arm that finds the female’s reproductive opening and carries sperm to it. According to a 2026 study in Science by … Read more
A shark you could lose in your pocket Clavusodens mcginnisi was no longer than a human finger, 3 to 4 inches (7.5 to 10 cm) from nose to tail. It swam 340 million years ago, in a warm, shallow sea that once covered what is now Kentucky, over rock that would eventually become the ceilings … Read more
One Amino Acid, Two Different Squeaks Lab mice carrying a single human-specific change in one gene started vocalizing differently at two separate points in their lives. Researchers at Rockefeller University and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, led by neuro-oncologist Robert Darnell, used CRISPR gene editing to swap the standard mouse version of a gene called NOVA1 … Read more
Pull the queen out of a honeybee hive, and the workers simply carry on. They’re sterile; the throne was never open to them. Pull the queen out of a colony of Polistes canadensis, the tropical paper wasp, and you get something closer to a riot. Pull the queen, watch the brawl The colonies in question … Read more
