A chimpanzee mother in Gabon caught a flying insect out of the air, chewed it, and pressed it onto her son’s open wound. It is the first time any animal has been filmed treating another individual’s injury with an insect, and it turned into one of the stranger papers to come out of primatology in … Read more
One Life, One Season, Two Different Eyes A common buckeye butterfly (Junonia coenia) lives just 8 to 10 days as an adult, according to the team that studied it. In that short window the insect is born into either summer or fall and dies long before the season turns. It never meets the other one. … Read more
A two-centimeter skull just rewrote 166 million years of furniture Marmoretta oxoniensis, a stem lepidosaur (an early branch of the lineage that leads to today’s lizards, snakes, and the tuatara, a lizard-like reptile found only in New Zealand) that lived around 166 million years ago, spent part of its life climbing trees, not paddling through … Read more
The bite still in its jaws A theropod dinosaur died with another animal’s arm bone wedged between its teeth. The specimen is Joaquinraptor casali, a newly described megaraptorid described by Lucio Ibiricu of the Patagonian Institute of Geology and Paleontology (IPGP), Argentina, and colleagues, published in Nature Communications in 2025. It comes from the Lago … Read more
The Experiment Ten royal ground snakes (Erythrolamprus reginae), collected from the Colombian Amazon, were starved for several days and then each offered a single meal: a three-striped poison dart frog (Ameerega trivittata), a species whose skin carries toxins capable of shutting down nerve and muscle function. Six of the ten snakes refused to touch it. … Read more
A Laser Made a Zebrafish’s Heart Beat 50 Percent Faster A zebrafish larva’s (Danio rerio) resting heart rate rose from about 2 beats per second to about 2.7 beats per second, a jump of roughly 50 percent, and no sound wave ever touched its ear. Xiaoshuai Liu and colleagues at Guangzhou University, China, published the … Read more
A bat weighing about a quarter of an ounce (7 grams) was recaptured in the wild 41 years after it was first banded, a lifespan roughly twenty times longer than a mouse that size would ever reach. That one bat, and the genus of small brown bats it belongs to, are forcing a rethink of … Read more
The Flip Starfish, the class Asteroidea, do something nobody expected from a group that was supposed to play by the same rules as everything else. In shallow water they crowd the tropics, same as almost every other group of animals on record. Past about 656 ft (200 m), the pattern flips: species diversity drops near … Read more
The chimpanzees who helped identify hepatitis C, cured of it decades later Eight chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) at Kumamoto Sanctuary in Kumamoto, Japan, carried hepatitis C virus for decades, an infection given to them deliberately, at several institutions across the country, so scientists could study a pathogen nobody could yet name. That work helped identify hepatitis … Read more
The Fish That Stopped Growing Up North Sea Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) now reach sexual maturity at just over 19.7 inches (50 cm). Model a population that had never felt a trawl net, and the same species is expected to mature past 27.6 inches (70 cm). That gap, published March 16, 2023 in Nature Sustainability … Read more
