The Finding In Sarasota Bay, Florida, bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) that steal bait off fishing lines or scavenge fish from boats don’t just share a bad habit. They spend their lives with the other dolphins who share it. A study led by Kyra Bankhead of Oregon State University, with coauthors Mauricio Cantor, also of Oregon … Read more
A Spike Nearly a Yard Long, Growing Out of a Rib Spicomellus afer lived more than 165 million years ago in what is now Morocco, and it is the oldest known ankylosaur, the group of armored, plant-eating dinosaurs best known for the tail club some of them carried later on. New fossils, described in a … Read more
The skull that shouldn’t have fit A koala skull with a strange dimple in its cheek turned out to belong to a species science had never named, after sitting misidentified in Western Australian collections for more than a century. In 2024, the family of caver Lindsay Hatcher, described by the museum as an avid caver, … Read more
The Palps That Shouldn’t Fit In four newly described tarantulas from the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa, males carry palps, the short, leg-like appendages spiders use to transfer sperm during mating, that stretch to nearly half the length of their own walking legs. That is not a typo and not some developmental fluke. … Read more
In Yingku village, in the East Siang district of Arunachal Pradesh, entomologists have described an ant colored like polished sapphire, a shade almost unheard of among the world’s 16,724 described ant species and subspecies. Paraparatrechina neela measures about a sixteenth of an inch (roughly 1.6 mm, under 2 mm by total length), and its blue … Read more
Five Harvestmen Walk Into the Same Rainforest… At the Panguana Biological Research Station in the Peruvian Amazon, five harvestman species share the same patch of forest floor, the same nocturnal hours, and roughly the same body plan. Under a normal flashlight, telling them apart takes a trained eye. Under a UV light, it takes no … Read more
Ninety-Six Percent Scientists at the Federal University of Santa Catarina examined 53 skipjack tuna (Katsuwonus pelamis) caught off the coast of southern Brazil and found parasitic worms in 96% of them. The total count across the haul exceeded 1,600 individual worms. The infected tissues included the muscle: the flesh sold at fish counters, served in … Read more
They Keep Coming Back to the Same Trees Stone piles sit at the base of specific trees in the savanna-woodland of Boé National Park, Guinea-Bissau. The bark above them is gouged and scarred. Some of those piles have been there since the mid-2010s, and the western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) that built them have been … Read more
The Worm That Outlived the Expectation A pill already prescribed for high blood pressure made roundworms live longer, in living Caenorhabditis elegans worms, with a maximum mean lifespan increase of 19% compared to untreated controls, in a study published January 20, 2023, in Aging Cell. The drug is rilmenidine, used to treat hypertension, with a … Read more
The Teenager Who Already Had the Skull for a Fight A Zavacephale rinpoche individual that had not finished growing was already carrying a complete cranial dome, the dense, mineralized skull cap that defines the pachycephalosaur group. Unfused sutures in the scapula and coracoid confirmed the animal was still growing; two growth rings in a cross-section … Read more