Bruce Never Loses Bruce, a kea (Nestor notabilis) at Willowbank Wildlife Reserve on New Zealand’s South Island, was born without an upper beak, and he is the undisputed alpha of his twelve-bird group, known among kea researchers as a circus. Over a four-week observation period, researchers tracked 227 social and aggressive interactions inside the aviary. … Read more
The jaw nobody believed Nine fossil lower jawbones, pulled from a dry riverbed in a forest near Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, looked at first like nothing more than breakage, exactly what pressure does to bone after 275 million years. Martha Richter, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, first suspected the pieces might not … Read more
The Most Canadian Animal Isn’t the One on the Coin A squat, warty amphibian that most people would walk past without a second look turns out to be more genetically exclusive to Canada than the beaver or the moose have ever been. PhD student Jayna Bergman, working in Professor Julie Lee-Yaw’s lab at the University … Read more
A Dog’s Brain Doesn’t Confuse a Scared Face With a Sad One A dog’s brain treats a frightened human face and a sad one as two separate problems, not one blurry “not happy” signal. That’s the finding from a team led by Raúl Hernández-Pérez, a neuroscientist at the University of Vienna, published in the journal … Read more
The livers keep washing up missing Eight great white sharks have washed ashore near Gansbaai, South Africa, since 2017. Seven were missing their livers. A couple had lost their hearts too. Somebody figured out exactly which organ was worth the trouble, and it wasn’t a fisherman. Before 2017, great whites (Carcharodon carcharias) had only abandoned … Read more
A Bee Moved Into a Dead Rodent’s Mouth A solitary burrowing bee moved its nursery into the mouth of an animal that had been dead for a very long time. Paleontologist Lázaro W. Viñola-López, of the Florida Museum of Natural History, and five colleagues were excavating Cueva de Mono, a limestone cave southwest of the … Read more
A false killer whale in Hawaiian waters lost about 500 pounds (227 kg) in roughly ten weeks, shedding close to 28 percent of its body mass. Researchers caught the loss on drone footage as part of a seven-year study of a population that now numbers fewer than 140 animals. The species is Pseudorca crassidens, the … Read more
A Toxoplasma gondii infection does not have to take over a mouse’s brain to mess with it. It just has to change what a few neurons are saying to their neighbors. A research team led by Emma Wilson and Emily Tabaie at the University of California, Riverside, School of Medicine infected cultured mouse neurons, grown … Read more
The Oldest Ant Ever Found Was Already a Monster 113 million years ago, in what is now northeastern Brazil, an ant died with its jaws already built like scythes. Its name is Vulcanidris cratensis. A team led by Anderson Lepeco at the Zoological Museum of the University of São Paulo confirmed it as the oldest … Read more
An estimated 15% of the body of Schmidtea mediterranea, a freshwater planarian, is made of pluripotent stem cells, meaning cells that haven’t committed to being any particular tissue yet and can still become almost anything the animal needs, though some estimates put that share as high as 20 to 30%. In a human body, the … Read more
