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.
Male lions can take food from lionesses, but their hardest-to-replace role is deterring takeovers that threaten resident males and dependent cubs.
Aug 18, 2026
The spotted hyena's proportionally large heart fits an endurance-hunting body, while the lion is built to shorten a chase. The comparison also exposes the scavenger myth.
Aug 18, 2026
A Namib field study recorded an oryx at 44°C while one instrumented hunter maintained thermal control. The result supports feasibility, not proof that persistence hunting drove human evolution.
Aug 17, 2026
The human nuchal ligament helps stabilize the head during running and leaves an indirect trace in early Homo skulls, but one feature cannot prove ancient behaviour.
Aug 16, 2026
In the deep water of the Black Sea, below roughly 150 metres, oxygen simply runs out.
Aug 16, 2026
Five miles below the surface of the western Pacific, in a crescent-shaped gash in the seafloor 1,580 miles long, small pink fish are drifting through water that would crush a steel submarine.
Aug 16, 2026
Satellite-tagged juvenile godwit B6 remained airborne from Alaska to Tasmania for 11 days and one hour, while later track models place the distance between about 13,391 and 13,560 kilometres.
Aug 16, 2026
Ocean Census documented 1,121 candidate marine species in one year, but its rapid discovery status is distinct from a completed formal taxonomic description.
Aug 15, 2026
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
