The dolphins everyone photographs are barely having babies Calves make up only about 9% of the spinner dolphins living off Hawaiʻi Island, when a stable, healthy population of this species would be expected to run closer to 17% young. The animal in question is the Hawaiian spinner dolphin (Stenella longirostris, subspecies longirostris), a slim, long-beaked … Read more
One wasp, collected in Chile’s Valdivia province, sat in a museum drawer for four decades before anyone noticed it wasn’t what the label said. It turned out to be an entirely new genus of parasitic wasp, and scientists at the Natural History Museum in London have named it Attenboroughnculus tau, timed to Sir David Attenborough’s … Read more
The Worms That Lived Longer Without Skipping a Meal A roundworm about 0.04 inches (1 millimeter) long, a transparent, unsegmented tube with no legs and no face to speak of, lived roughly 19% longer after a dose of a drug sold for high blood pressure. It kept eating exactly as much as it always had. … Read more
Five female African green monkeys (Chlorocebus sabaeus) at Yale University received a dozen injections of a synthetic, Alzheimer’s-linked protein, delivered through a port placed into their cerebrospinal fluid space: three doses a week, four weeks running. These are wild-derived research animals, not a breed, part of a colony descended from a feral African green monkey … Read more
The Fish That Reads Its Neighbor’s Mail An elephantnose fish does not read only its own electricity. It also reads yours, if you happen to be another elephantnose fish swimming close by. Federico Pedraja and Nathaniel Sawtell, at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute, published the finding in Nature on March 6, 2024, in a paper titled … Read more
Seventeen semi-captive African savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana), living with Elephant CREW in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, used 38 distinct gestures, on purpose, to ask a human for apples. Some swung the trunk’s two finger-like tips toward the tray holding the fruit. Some reached straight at the person who controlled it. Researchers from the University of Vienna, … Read more
A Drawer at the Natural History Museum, Open for 44 Years Thirty-one fossil vertebrae, each only a few millimeters long, came out of Hordle Cliff on England’s south coast in 1981. They went into a museum drawer and stayed there, unidentified, for 44 years. In 2025, Dr. Georgios Georgalis of the Institute of Systematics and … Read more
The crocodile that was built like a linebacker At 11.5 feet (3.5 meters) long and about 550 pounds (250 kilograms), Kostensuchus atrox had roughly the footprint of a compact sedan, if that sedan had teeth. It’s a newly described species of peirosaurid crocodyliform, a branch of the crocodile family tree that split off long ago. … Read more
The Beak That Shouldn’t Exist A single fossilized jaw, the kind that normally sits labeled and forgotten in a museum drawer, is the entire reason anyone can now talk about a 61-foot octopus. Paleontologists Shin Ikegami and Yasuhiro Iba, working out of Hokkaido University, analyzed 27 fossilized octopus beaks, 15 already held in museum collections, … Read more
The seven years nobody counted Pull a tooth from a stranded common dolphin (Delphinus delphis) and you can read its age the way you’d read a tree stump, ring by ring. Do that for enough animals and you get something aerial surveys never give you: an actual lifespan. In the Bay of Biscay, female common … Read more
