Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) eat fermented fruit off the forest floor so routinely that the scientists studying them had to borrow a word for it, because none existed in the scientific literature. A paper titled “Fermented Fruits: Scrumping, Sharing, and the Origin of Feasting,” published online July 31, 2025 in BioScience (Volume 75, Issue 9, pages … Read more
A Brandt’s myotis (Myotis brandtii), a bat that weighs about 0.25 ounces (7 grams), roughly the heft of a two-euro coin, was banded somewhere in Europe and recaptured fifty years later. That recapture, noted in the background materials behind a new genome study, stands as the longevity figure cited in the press materials for the … Read more
The Jelly That Jumped the Line The first animal to ever branch off on the tree of life probably already had a nervous system and muscles. That is the finding, not a guess, and it knocks sponges off a pedestal they’ve held in biology classrooms for decades. Researchers from the University of Vienna, UC Berkeley, … Read more
Two Rivers, Two Rulebooks Female bonobos (Pan paniscus) at Kokolopori, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, won 98.4% of their conflicts with males in 2020. In the same species, at a community called Ekalakala, males won 81.8% of the time in 2016. Ask someone which sex runs a bonobo troop and they’ll say female. … Read more
A tiny clone with a chemistry set A microscopic freshwater animal, invisible to the naked eye, appears to brew its own antibiotic-style chemistry using genetic recipes it copied wholesale from bacteria. In a study published July 18, 2024 in Nature Communications, researchers Reuben Nowell, Fernando Rodriguez, Bette Hecox-Lea, David Mark Welch, Irina Arkhipova, Timothy Barraclough … Read more
A Mouse’s Six Months of Sniffing Mint Changed Its Brain Two groups of mice breathed the same vapor for six months, and both brains changed for the better. At the Center for Applied Medical Research (CIMA) at the Universidad de Navarra in Pamplona, Spain, immunologist Juan José Lasarte, neuroscientist Ana García-Osta, and immunologist Noelia Casares … Read more
The spider with longer arms than it needs A male Satyrex ferox grows palps, the short, leg-like feelers near a spider’s mouth, up to 2 inches (5 cm) long. On a spider with a legspan of 5.5 inches (14 centimeters), that is almost as long as a genuine walking leg, and nearly four times the … Read more
A Dog-Sized Dinosaur Just Rewrote the Dome’s Timeline A dinosaur about the size of a German shepherd walked an Early Cretaceous lake shore in Mongolia 108 million years ago, already carrying a thick bony dome on top of its skull. It was not an adult. Paleontologist Tsogtbaatar Chinzorig led the team that described the new … Read more
A jellyfish fossil that still has its insides A creature that was roughly 95 percent water left a fossil detailed enough to show its tentacles and internal anatomy, 505 million years after it died. Royal Ontario Museum researchers Justin Moon, Joseph Moysiuk, and Jean-Bernard Caron named the species Burgessomedusa phasmiformis, describing it from 182 fossils … Read more
900 Acquaintances, Zero Close Friends Male Masai giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis tippelskirchi), an endangered subspecies native to northern Tanzania, collect far more social contacts than females do, and it isn’t close. A five-year study of 1,081 free-ranging giraffes across the Tarangire Ecosystem, an unfenced range of more than a thousand square kilometers, mapped who associates with … Read more
