The Fish with Four Eyes Two Cambrian fish species had four eyes, not two. Fossils of Haikouichthys ercaicunensis and an unnamed myllokunmingid, both pulled from the Chengjiang fossil beds in Yunnan province, southern China, and dated to roughly 518 million years ago, show two large eyes on the sides of the head and a second, … Read more
A fossil fish the size of a minnow, dead for more than 300 million years, still has its brain inside its skull. Not a mold of where the brain used to be, not an impression pressed into rock: the neural tissue itself, fossilized, sitting exactly where the fish left it. The specimen belongs to a … Read more
A Bear Population’s DNA Is Moving Faster Than It Should Twelve polar bears (Ursus maritimus) from the cold, ice-locked northeast of Greenland. Five from an isolated pocket of warmer coastline in the southeast. That is the entire sample behind a finding published on December 12, 2025, in the journal Mobile DNA: in the five southeastern … Read more
The Sidewalk Shrine That Honored the Wrong Rodent Thousands of people walked out of their way to leave coins, cigarettes, candles, and even estradiol pills in front of a concrete pothole in Chicago’s Roscoe Village neighborhood. They were paying respects to a rat. A study published October 15, 2025 in the journal Biology Letters, led … Read more
The mice that forgot how to remember, and didn’t Laboratory house mice (Mus musculus) lost more than half of the synapses in their hippocampus, the brain region that files away new memories, within 24 hours of being pushed into a two-day artificial hibernation. A synapse is the junction where one neuron hands a signal to … Read more
A Crocodile Relative With Fifty Steak Knives for a Mouth Kostensuchus atrox carried more than 50 conical, serrated teeth, some nearly 2 inches (5 cm) long, in a jaw strong enough that the paleontologist who described it put it bluntly: it could “break a person into two pieces with a single bite.” Diego Pol and … Read more
A Wookiee at 2,175 Feet In September 2006, a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) surveying the seafloor off Molokaʻi, Hawaiʻi, filmed a coral colony standing about 4 feet (1.2 meters) tall at a depth of 2,175 feet (663 meters). A decade later, in 2016, a second specimen turned up on an unnamed seamount near the Mariana … Read more
The Photograph That Shouldn’t Exist A wild fox has lived on Cozumel, a Mexican island of beach resorts, dive shops, and cruise ship piers, for longer than anyone has had a camera trained on it. A short communication in Neotropical Biology and Conservation, published in 2026 by Travis D. Bayer, Maggie A. McGreal, and A. … Read more
The Fact: Elephants Call Each Other By Name Wild African savanna (bush) elephants (Loxodonta africana) in Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve and Amboseli National Park address specific herd members with individual, name-like vocal labels, according to a study published June 10, 2024, in Nature Ecology & Evolution. Researchers from Colorado State University, Save the Elephants and … Read more
Nine Pups, Six Survivors, One Mouse Back From Orbit A female laboratory mouse spent two weeks orbiting Earth and came home able to have babies. Four black-coated laboratory mice, numbered 6, 98, 154 and 186, two males and two females, launched aboard the Shenzhou-21 spacecraft on October 31, 2025, bound for China’s Tiangong space station, … Read more
