The children kept coming, small hands reaching over the fence to pat a pony’s neck while it pulled hay from a rack and chewed, unbothered. Around the eight Gotland russ horses at Slottsskogen park in Gothenburg, the spring afternoon was all noise and motion: infants squealing, adults leaning in, the general low chaos of a … Read more
Cut open a supergiant isopod hauled up from nearly a kilometre down, and the first thing you notice is the stomach. It fills roughly two-thirds of the body cavity, packed tight with a finely ground, mud-like paste of whatever the animal last managed to scavenge from the seabed. Everything else, the legs, the armoured plates, … Read more
From a few hundred feet up, a drone can read a whale’s body the way a doctor reads a chart. Width at the head, width across the midsection, the long taper toward the flukes: feed those numbers into the right equations and you get volume, and from volume, an estimate of mass. One false killer … Read more
The bird bones at Changma come in clusters, broken and crushed into tight little pellets, the kind of thing a modern owl coughs up after a meal. Hundreds of prehistoric birds, scattered through a fossil bed in northwestern China, some of them mangled in a way that screamed predator. For years nobody could say what … Read more
At one end of the family sits the tsetse fly, a strong flier with big eyes that picks out a buffalo or a person from across an African clearing. At the other end live the bat flies, eyeless or nearly so, scuttling through fur in the dark and almost never leaving their host. Two ways … Read more
The queen is not in charge. Not really. In a bumble bee colony, the most consequential decisions about who gets to become the next monarch are made by workers, those smaller, supposedly subordinate females that spend their days hauling pollen and tending to brood. A new study from Penn State has confirmed something rather unsettling … Read more
Somewhere in a basement drawer at the Natural History Museum in London, sealed in a jar of ethanol that has since outlived the man who collected it, a snake has been sitting. It arrived in 1860, brought back from the Garhwal Himalaya by the brothers von Schlagintweit during a four-year expedition on behalf of the … Read more
Remove a queen from a tropical paper wasp colony and the nest goes to pieces, more or less immediately. Aggression rates jump tenfold within 24 hours. Workers that had spent their days foraging for food drop what they’re doing and start fighting instead, biting, grappling, stinging. Multiple females compete simultaneously for the reproductive vacancy, and … Read more
The fossil had been catalogued, labelled and largely ignored for years. It sat in the research collection of the American Museum of Natural History under the name Tylosaurus proriger, a moderately famous marine reptile from the Late Cretaceous, the sort of specimen that turns up in mosasaur reviews as a known quantity. Amelia Zietlow, then … Read more
Hold a ruler alongside a standard doorframe and you get roughly two metres. The front leg bone of Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis is 1.78 metres long. A single limb, roughly as tall as a person, from an animal that nobody in science had heard of until last week. The bone sat in northeastern Thailand’s youngest dinosaur-bearing rock … Read more
Nature’s Secrets, Scientifically Told.