Shorty Between 2024 and 2025, field surveys on Tsushima Island turned up three Tsushima leopard cats (Prionailurus bengalensis euptilurus) with tails cut to roughly half the species’ normal length. Nobody had ever recorded this before, not in this subspecies and not in any leopard cat population studied anywhere. One of the three cats was caught, … Read more
The Front Legs Give It Away A dog’s front legs start losing ground before anything else does, and how much ground they lose tracks the animal’s cognitive health more closely than it tracks the animal’s age. That is the finding from a team at North Carolina State University led by veterinary neurologist Natasha Olby, with … Read more
The Feet That Ice Built Are Getting Iced Polar bear (Ursus maritimus) foot pads are covered in small bumps built for one job: grip on ice. Now that same surface is collecting something else. Slabs of ice up to a foot across (30 centimeters) are freezing directly onto the skin of the pads, not tangled … Read more
The Sword Dragon of Golden Cap A 10-foot (3-meter) marine reptile that patrolled the seas off what is now Dorset, England, about 183 million years ago has a formal name. In a study published October 9, 2025, in the journal Papers in Palaeontology, paleontologists Dean Lomax, Judy Massare, and Erin Maxwell described it as a … Read more
The number that should be impossible A red-backed shrike weighs 25 to 30 grams (0.9 to 1.1 ounces), about as much as three sheets of paper. Males are easy to pick out: an ash-gray head, a black stripe across the eye like a mask, a chestnut-brown back over pale underparts. Every spring, this small songbird … Read more
Monarch butterflies laid three times as many eggs on aphid-free tropical milkweed as they did on plants crawling with oleander aphids, according to a nursery study out of the University of Florida published in PLOS ONE in July 2023. Bernadette Mach, William Long, Jaret Daniels and Adam Dale ran the experiment in Gainesville, Florida: one … Read more
One Ear, Two Worlds Seals hear equally well in air and underwater. Not “pretty good” in both, not “fine on land and passable at sea”: equally well, according to a study led by Dr. James Rule of the Natural History Museum in London and Monash University, with Dr. Natalie Cooper of the Natural History Museum, … Read more
A Jawbone Older Than Anyone Was Ready to Prove A dog jawbone pulled out of Gough’s Cave in Somerset, England, sometime between 1927 and 1931 belonged to an animal alive roughly 14,300 years ago. A second jawbone, from Pınarbaşı in Türkiye, is older still: about 15,800 years ago. Both have now had their whole genomes … Read more
Ten Thousand Sounds, Zero Audience A bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) living completely alone in a Danish channel was recorded making 10,833 separate sounds over 69 days, between December 8, 2022, and February 14, 2023. The count comes from a study led by cetacean biologist Olga Filatova of the University of Southern Denmark, published in the … Read more
Raise an Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus) chick by hand instead of by wild parents, and it will fly worse on its first trip south. Track it a second time, and you cannot tell it apart from a bird that never spent a day in captivity. Raised by Hand, Flies Like It A team from Ben-Gurion … Read more
