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.
A 2008 photograph was too blurry to establish a species. Clearer images, 114 detections, anatomy, calls and DNA have now placed Likweli on the primate family tree.
Aug 15, 2026
A 2025 PNAS study identified 46 vertebrate taxa in a northern Norwegian cave deposit, revealing a coastal Arctic community from roughly 85,000 to 71,000 years ago.
Aug 15, 2026
A newborn kangaroo's body is unfinished in almost every visible way, yet its forelimbs and sensory circuits are precisely prepared for the three-minute climb to the pouch.
Aug 15, 2026
A dried lakebed in Chad exhales roughly 27.7 million tonnes of phosphorus-rich dust each year. Trade winds carry it 5,000 kilometres to the Amazon, where it fertilises soils that would otherwise starve.
Aug 14, 2026
A Denisovan-derived EPAS1 haplotype rose to roughly 80–86% frequency in Tibetan samples, but interbreeding and selection were probably separated by millennia.
Aug 14, 2026
When rain finally broke a 500-year drought in the Atacama, it brought catastrophe to the microbes adapted to thrive in absolute aridity.
Aug 14, 2026
Hibernating bears sleep twice as much as summer bears despite running on a quarter power, upending assumptions about metabolic shutdown.
Aug 13, 2026
The discovery raises tantalizing questions about ancient Mediterranean trade routes and what other riches might still lie buried beneath the waves.
Aug 13, 2026
Nature's most extreme marriage: the male anglerfish sacrifices his body to become a permanent organ fused to his mate's flesh.
Aug 12, 2026
Scientists have dramatically underestimated how many species experience menopause—and new evidence reveals why older females matter more than we thought.
Aug 11, 2026
A river in the Peruvian Amazon reaches about 86 degrees Celsius despite lying more than 700 kilometres from an active volcano. The leading explanation is a fault-fed, non-volcanic hydrothermal system.
Aug 8, 2026
A newborn arrives with roughly 300 bones held together by cartilage, and an adult has 206. The missing hundred fused — in the skull, spine, pelvis, and long bones — across childhood and adolescence, converting a soft mosaic into a single articulated frame.
Aug 8, 2026
