The Fact: Seals Are Picky About Ice A harbor seal (Phoca vitulina) in Johns Hopkins Inlet, Alaska, does not climb onto the nearest floating iceberg. It picks one that matches the job it has that month. Lynn Kaluzienski, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alaska Southeast working with U.S. National Park Service collaborators, tracked … Read more
The World’s Oldest Octopus Just Stopped Being an Octopus Pohlsepia mazonensis is not an octopus. For 25 years, this 310-million-year-old fossil, a nodule roughly 3.1 inches (80 mm) long and 2 inches (50 mm) wide pulled from the Mazon Creek deposits of northeastern Illinois and held at the Field Museum in Chicago as specimen PE51727, … Read more
A greyhound with scales, 215 million years old Galahadosuchus jonesi ran on long, slender legs across dry ground 215 million years ago, built more like a greyhound than anything you would call a crocodile. Ewan Bodenham, a PhD researcher at the Natural History Museum in London and University College London, has formally named it as … Read more
The Shark That Wasn’t Supposed to Be There In January 2025, a baited camera dropped by Alan Jamieson’s team hit the seafloor 1,608 feet (490 meters) down, off Antarctica’s South Shetland Islands, in water sitting at a near-freezing 34.29°F (1.27°C). A shark crossed into frame: 10 to 13 feet (3 to 4 meters) long, gliding … Read more
Two 9-Second Glances: What a Cat Learns Before You’ve Finished a Sentence Thirty-one cats sat in front of a screen at Azabu University in Kanagawa, Japan, and needed only about four trials, two 9-second looks at a single image, to link it to a word that meant absolutely nothing. That’s roughly 18 seconds of exposure … Read more
The Encore Nobody Was Listening For African lions do not stop at one roar. A study of 3,149 recorded vocalizations found that every full-throated roar is followed, without fail, by a second, quieter call, a pattern that went unnoticed for as long as anyone has been recording lions. The team, led by Jonathan Growcott, a … Read more
Three Pups, One Announcement Colossal Biosciences CEO Ben Lamm has announced three living animals that his company calls dire wolves (Aenocyon dirus), a species extinct for roughly 12,500 years. Two of them, males named Romulus and Remus, were born by cesarean section on October 1, 2024. A third, a female named Khaleesi, was born on … Read more
A cow with a broom, and a rule for which end goes where Veronika, a 13-year-old Swiss Brown cow (Braunvieh) kept as a family pet in the mountain village of Nötsch im Gailtal, Austria, picks up a deck broom with her mouth and uses it like two separate tools. The bristle end goes on her … Read more
A Crowd at the Colony Fourteen pumas (Puma concolor) wore GPS collars in Monte León National Park, on the Patagonian coast of Argentina’s Santa Cruz Province, for a study that ended up complicating everything textbooks say about the species. Nine of those pumas hunted Magellanic penguins (Spheniscus magellanicus) from a mainland colony of roughly 40,000 … Read more
The Chihuahua has more brain to spare than the Siberian husky, and it’s worse at its job In domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiaris), the breeds people trust with the hardest work have the smallest brains for their size, not the biggest. Ana Balcarcel and colleagues at the University of Montpellier measured 1,682 adult dog skulls … Read more