A hundred years of nothing, then a baby For a century, the heaviest invertebrate on Earth existed, as far as science was concerned, as a collection of fragments: arm fragments from whale stomachs, beaks from whale and seabird stomachs, a few dead animals taken as bycatch. British zoologist Guy Coburn Robson formally described Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni … Read more
The Oldest Ant in the World Was Already a Monster The oldest confirmed ant in the fossil record was already, at 113 million years old, carrying one of the most extreme predatory jaw systems in insect evolutionary history. That ant is Vulcanidris cratensis, described by entomologist Anderson Lepeco and colleagues at the Museum of Zoology, … Read more
A Handful of White Cats in Small Crates Changed Everything Every white cat living in East Asia may carry a genetic echo of a founding group that merchants transported across Central Asia approximately 1,300 years ago. A study led by Yu Han and Professor Luo Shujin of Peking University, published in Cell Genomics on November … Read more
A Frog Confirmed Alive by Matching Nothing The identification of Pristimantis ruidus in 2022 worked backwards. Geneticists at Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja ran the DNA of two newly collected females against sequences from 35 related species held in a gene bank. Every comparison came back negative. That clean sweep of non-matches was the confirmation. … Read more
He Emerged in Perfect Health. His Sperm Were Half Gone. Nine months after a three-day heat wave, a male red mason bee (Osmia bicornis) flew out of his nest looking completely normal. Right size, right color, right behavior. Researchers at the University of Hull had split a group of O. bicornis larvae into two batches: … Read more
2,000 Whales, the Diversity of a Much Larger Population A DNA analysis of 623 beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas) sampled from Bristol Bay, Alaska, over 13 years returned a result the research team plainly did not expect: genetic diversity on par with beluga populations many times larger, and inbreeding rates so low they barely registered. The … Read more
