Nature and ecology
Natural History is Science Blog's desk for the living world. Animals, evolution, and ecology, reported from the field science and the papers rather than the press releases.
Ming was frozen with roughly 200 research specimens before its age was known. A later count of 507 annual shell rings placed its birth around 1499.
Sep 13, 2026
A picturesque introduction of two swans to Michigan a century ago has become an ecological crisis the state now races to reverse.
Sep 12, 2026
A museum series of Sorex unguiculatus from Tomakomai confirms Dehnel's winter braincase shrink in an Asian shrew, and adds a reverse pattern in the snout that the authors did not find in the jaw.
Sep 12, 2026
The difference is real and the size of it is not settled: measured against the best of the study's three control batches, the advantage shrinks from 27 percentage points to five.
Sep 12, 2026
Fifteen of the 18 recruited parrots made 147 voluntary calls after training. The behavior was real, but preferred partners and newly learned skills require careful reading.
Sep 11, 2026
These fleeting episodes of neural activity suggest octopuses may experience a second sleep stage—one that looks suspiciously like dreaming.
Sep 10, 2026
When a politician's legislative dreams died, he spent three decades and his own fortune assembling a wilderness park one deed at a time.
Sep 10, 2026
A London infrastructure megaproject's three million tonnes of excavated clay found an unlikely second life: resurrecting a vanished English wetland and creating refuge for millions of migratory birds.
Sep 10, 2026
The gene work was done on wild flies caught in a Kenyan reserve, because this species is so hard to infect in a laboratory.
Sep 10, 2026
A can of black paint slashed eagle deaths at a Norwegian wind farm—and the finding is reshaping how the industry thinks about saving birds.
Sep 10, 2026
A controlled Kalahari trial tested how live-prey practice helps meerkat pups handle scorpions, building on observations of older helpers providing graduated challenges.
Sep 10, 2026
Ten transplanted wall lizards founded a population with a different diet, stronger bites and distinctive gut anatomy. Follow-up studies examine the roles of plasticity and genetic change.
Sep 9, 2026
Massive ice deposits hidden beneath Utah mountain rubble could reshape understanding of water resources and climate patterns in the American West.
Sep 9, 2026
A half-century of mammal counts on a Panama Canal island is about to become a century-long experiment in ecological change—if the handoff works.
Sep 9, 2026
