The bones were so small that at first glance they looked like they might belong to juveniles. But Fidel Torcida Fernández-Baldor of the Dinosaur Museum of Salas de los Infantes reckoned otherwise. Scattered across the Burgos Province site in northern Spain, the delicate fossils represented at least five individuals—all adults, all impossibly tiny for dinosaurs. … Read more
Off Canada’s coast, in the cold waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, something extraordinary is quietly happening. Three species of baleen whales—creatures so massive they seem to belong to another era—are changing what they eat. They’re doing it together, shifting their feeding patterns as the ocean warms. But this isn’t the violent competition you … Read more
The ice in Bristol Bay closes down hard by November, locking away the whales for months in the icebound waters beneath it. When researchers finally arrive in spring with their small boats and biopsies, they’re after something most people never think about: who’s sleeping with whom, and what it means for survival in one of … Read more
Watch a centimeter-long aquatic worm wiggle through a dish of scattered sand, and something peculiar happens. The grains gradually gather into compact piles. The mess disappears. It looks intentional, except the worm has no brain worth mentioning and cannot sense the particles it is moving. Physicists from the University of Amsterdam, Georgia Tech, and Sorbonne … Read more
Tropical house crickets raised in Ottawa, Canada, happily gobbled polyethylene microplastics mixed into their feed, treating them much like normal food. The work appears in Environmental Science & Technology and followed the insects for seven weeks as they grew roughly 20 times heavier without obvious stunting despite chronic plastic exposure. The team used fluorescent plastic … Read more
Most of us would probably try to downplay an illness, but for ant pupae, the best way to protect family is to scent their own death. Researchers at IST Austria have found that when young ants catch a truly deadly infection, they sound an invisible chemical alarm. The result isn’t a rescue. It’s a swift … Read more
Before a young orangutan ever forages alone in the forest, its mind is already carrying a crowded library of cultural knowledge. A new study in Nature Human Behaviour, led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and based on 12 years of field data from Sumatran orangutans, shows that this library does … Read more
Deep in the African night, it turns out that lions are not just roaring, they are speaking in two different roaring voices that computers can now tell apart with remarkable precision. In a new observational study published in Ecology and Evolution, researchers led by the University of Exeter used machine learning to show that African … Read more
At mealtimes, rabbit sized Australian bettongs turn into nut cracking powerhouses that can splinter seeds tougher than popcorn kernels. In new imaging analysis led by Flinders University and published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, researchers used 3D scans and geometric morphometrics of 161 skulls from all four living bettong species to uncover … Read more
When the air around them turns desert dry, Madagascar hissing cockroaches do something surprisingly tender: they press their bodies together and ride out the stress as a crowd. In a new piece of research from Binghamton University, biologists show that these big, familiar classroom insects change how tightly they pack together depending on humidity, using … Read more