The Crocodile That Vanished Within a Lifetime For more than 250 years, sailors and early naturalists wrote about crocodiles on the beaches of the Seychelles the way you’d write about gulls: just there, a common and unremarkable sight on an Indian Ocean archipelago, noted in passing by people who had no reason to think the … Read more
Twenty-Two Collars, Seven Years, and an App Built for Joggers Between 2011 and 2018, researchers fitted GPS collars on 22 mountain lions (Puma concolor) living in and around the Santa Monica Mountains, the Simi Hills, Griffith Park, the Santa Susana Mountains, and the Verdugo Mountains, a scattering of wild patches stitched into greater Los Angeles. … Read more
Southern Resident killer whales living in the Salish Sea, the inland waters between Washington State and British Columbia, bite short segments off bull kelp stalks, then roll the piece between their own body and a partner’s. A study published in Current Biology in 2025 calls this the first documented case of a marine animal manufacturing … Read more
The Fact That Shouldn’t Be a Fact A horse’s face is longer than its bite actually requires, and so is a baboon’s, a red deer’s, a kangaroo’s, and a big cat’s, each one measured against its own smaller relatives. Within almost any group of closely related mammals, the larger species tends to have a proportionally … Read more
A dolphin can drown, a horse can’t vomit, and a silver-haired bat sings a love song pitched so high no human has ever caught it with a bare ear. The silver-haired bat (Lasionycteris noctivagans), one of the most common bats in the forests of Canada and the United States, produces a structured, three-part courtship song … Read more
Eleven Hours a Day, Three Hundred Days a Year In the hottest cattle-producing regions of Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Paraguay, and Uruguay, a beef animal spends more than 11 hours a day, on more than 300 days a year, in conditions that overwhelm its ability to cool itself. That is the headline number from a study … Read more
The treadmill trick that didn’t work Mice that run on a treadmill daily for two weeks get genuinely fitter: higher top speeds, longer runs before exhaustion. A study led by corresponding author J. Nicholas Betley at the University of Pennsylvania, published in the journal Neuron on February 12, 2026, found a way to erase every … Read more
A Shark’s Receptor Reacts to the Same Chemicals Yours Does The whitespotted bamboo shark (Chiloscyllium plagiosum) and the small-spotted catshark (Scyliorhinus canicula) both carry a working bitter-taste receptor gene, one that fires in response to several of the same compounds that make a human mouth pucker. In 2023, a team from the University of Cologne … Read more
The Specimen That Waited 43 Years A parasitic wasp 3.5 millimeters (0.14 in) long sat pinned in a drawer at the Natural History Museum, London, for forty-three years before anyone noticed it didn’t match anything else in the collection. It had been collected in 1983 in Valdivia Province, in southern Chile, and filed among thousands … Read more
The Fish with Four Eyes Two Cambrian fish species had four eyes, not two. Fossils of Haikouichthys ercaicunensis and an unnamed myllokunmingid, both pulled from the Chengjiang fossil beds in Yunnan province, southern China, and dated to roughly 518 million years ago, show two large eyes on the sides of the head and a second, … Read more
