Three Pups, One Announcement Colossal Biosciences CEO Ben Lamm has announced three living animals that his company calls dire wolves (Aenocyon dirus), a species extinct for roughly 12,500 years. Two of them, males named Romulus and Remus, were born by cesarean section on October 1, 2024. A third, a female named Khaleesi, was born on … Read more
A cow with a broom, and a rule for which end goes where Veronika, a 13-year-old Swiss Brown cow (Braunvieh) kept as a family pet in the mountain village of Nötsch im Gailtal, Austria, picks up a deck broom with her mouth and uses it like two separate tools. The bristle end goes on her … Read more
A Crowd at the Colony Fourteen pumas (Puma concolor) wore GPS collars in Monte León National Park, on the Patagonian coast of Argentina’s Santa Cruz Province, for a study that ended up complicating everything textbooks say about the species. Nine of those pumas hunted Magellanic penguins (Spheniscus magellanicus) from a mainland colony of roughly 40,000 … Read more
The Chihuahua has more brain to spare than the Siberian husky, and it’s worse at its job In domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiaris), the breeds people trust with the hardest work have the smallest brains for their size, not the biggest. Ana Balcarcel and colleagues at the University of Montpellier measured 1,682 adult dog skulls … Read more
One Mouse, Fifty-Eight Generations One house mouse (Mus musculus) is the ancestor of more than 1,200 clones spread across 58 generations of copies made from copies, a lineage Teruhiko Wakayama’s team at the University of Yamanashi has kept running for two decades. The animals are visually unremarkable: a laboratory line called BDF1, every clone female, … Read more
The reptile that lost its wings Its dental spacing seemed to match a pterosaur. Its arm bone said otherwise. For more than a decade, Faxinalipterus minimus was filed away as one of the earliest known pterosaurs, a small flying reptile that shared Triassic skies with the first dinosaurs. It was described in 2010 from fragmentary … Read more
A dinosaur pulled from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia had two fingers on each hand, not the three that every other known member of its family had, and each finger carried a claw close to a foot long, sheath, bone, and all, still fossilized together. One Fossil, Two Fingers In 2012, a team from the … Read more
– Uses correct subject-verb agreement throughout, Uses articles correctly (“a study,” “an injured mouse,” “the drug”), Maintains consistent verb tense (past tense for study findings, appropriately shifting to present for ongoing implications like “the lab says it plans to look further”), Uses pronouns and homophones correctly (its, it’s, etc.), Uses consistent American spelling, Uses punctuation … Read more
A Thumb-Sized Fish Rewrites Its Own Family Tree A fossil fish about 1.6 inches (4 cm) long, roughly the length of a thumb, has turned out to be the oldest known North American member of the otophysan supergroup, the lineage that today includes catfish, carp and tetras and accounts for two-thirds of all freshwater fish … Read more
The Free Lunch Test Forty pet dogs watched one person feed a fellow dog and another person refuse to feed it, then met both humans face to face. They showed no preference for the generous one. Not a slight lean, not a delay before deciding. Nothing measurable at all. The study, led by Hoi-Lam Jim … Read more