One Mouse, Fifty-Eight Generations One house mouse (Mus musculus) is the ancestor of more than 1,200 clones spread across 58 generations of copies made from copies, a lineage Teruhiko Wakayama’s team at the University of Yamanashi has kept running for two decades. The animals are visually unremarkable: a laboratory line called BDF1, every clone female, … Read more
The reptile that lost its wings Its dental spacing seemed to match a pterosaur. Its arm bone said otherwise. For more than a decade, Faxinalipterus minimus was filed away as one of the earliest known pterosaurs, a small flying reptile that shared Triassic skies with the first dinosaurs. It was described in 2010 from fragmentary … Read more
A dinosaur pulled from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia had two fingers on each hand, not the three that every other known member of its family had, and each finger carried a claw close to a foot long, sheath, bone, and all, still fossilized together. One Fossil, Two Fingers In 2012, a team from the … Read more
– Uses correct subject-verb agreement throughout, Uses articles correctly (“a study,” “an injured mouse,” “the drug”), Maintains consistent verb tense (past tense for study findings, appropriately shifting to present for ongoing implications like “the lab says it plans to look further”), Uses pronouns and homophones correctly (its, it’s, etc.), Uses consistent American spelling, Uses punctuation … Read more
A Thumb-Sized Fish Rewrites Its Own Family Tree A fossil fish about 1.6 inches (4 cm) long, roughly the length of a thumb, has turned out to be the oldest known North American member of the otophysan supergroup, the lineage that today includes catfish, carp and tetras and accounts for two-thirds of all freshwater fish … Read more
The Free Lunch Test Forty pet dogs watched one person feed a fellow dog and another person refuse to feed it, then met both humans face to face. They showed no preference for the generous one. Not a slight lean, not a delay before deciding. Nothing measurable at all. The study, led by Hoi-Lam Jim … Read more
The Finding In Sarasota Bay, Florida, bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) that steal bait off fishing lines or scavenge fish from boats don’t just share a bad habit. They spend their lives with the other dolphins who share it. A study led by Kyra Bankhead of Oregon State University, with coauthors Mauricio Cantor, also of Oregon … Read more
A Spike Nearly a Yard Long, Growing Out of a Rib Spicomellus afer lived more than 165 million years ago in what is now Morocco, and it is the oldest known ankylosaur, the group of armored, plant-eating dinosaurs best known for the tail club some of them carried later on. New fossils, described in a … Read more
The skull that shouldn’t have fit A koala skull with a strange dimple in its cheek turned out to belong to a species science had never named, after sitting misidentified in Western Australian collections for more than a century. In 2024, the family of caver Lindsay Hatcher, described by the museum as an avid caver, … Read more
The Palps That Shouldn’t Fit In four newly described tarantulas from the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa, males carry palps, the short, leg-like appendages spiders use to transfer sperm during mating, that stretch to nearly half the length of their own walking legs. That is not a typo and not some developmental fluke. … Read more