Submerged to the nostrils in warm, slow water, the animal waited. It had been waiting a long time, probably; crocodiles are good at that. Around it, the Hadar floodplain spread out in a patchwork of gallery forest and open grassland, lakes edged with sedge, streams running amber with silt. And somewhere along the bank, at … Read more
The left femur is about as long as your finger. Seventy-five millimetres of hollow bone, light enough that a poodle-sized animal could carry it without much effort, robust enough to reveal something odd: it grew faster, and thicker at the top, than the corresponding arm bone from the same species. Thirty-three complete femora from a … Read more
In the backyard birdhouses of Texas and Louisiana, purple martins arrive every February like a kind of promise. They come from the Amazon basin, navigating several thousand kilometres on instinct and timing refined over generations, and the people who put up houses for them, the landlords as they’re known in martin circles, look forward to … Read more
Did Nature’s Only Straight Lines Kickstart the Human Mind? Quartz crystals have been turning up at hominin sites for the better part of a million years. Twenty of them surfaced alongside Homo erectus remains at Zhoukoudian in China, deposited at least 600,000 years ago and possibly earlier. Six nearly complete prisms appeared in an Acheulian … Read more
Buried in a container of pig manure or sewage sludge, a black soldier fly larva spends its first weeks doing something genuinely useful: eating. It consumes the organic matter around it, converts it into body mass, and excretes what it cannot use as nutrient-rich pellets called frass. The process is efficient, well-understood, and increasingly seen … Read more
The species boundary is one of biology’s oldest fictions. A line we draw, then argue about, then redraw. In the rainforests of Malaysian Borneo, a group of small brown frogs with tooth-like projections on their jaws has been making that argument embarrassingly concrete for the last two decades, and a new genomic study has now … Read more
THE BONES had been sitting in a Patagonian hillside for 90 million years when a field team finally coaxed them out in 2014. Even then, it would take another decade before the fossil of Alnashetri cerropoliciensis — a bird-like dinosaur about the size of a large chicken, weighing under a kilogram — was ready to … Read more
The dromedary camel has spent millions of years being battered by bacteria, viruses and parasites across some of the harshest terrain on Earth. It rarely loses. While sheep and goats in the same Omani pastures fall to foot-and-mouth disease, tetanus and other common infections, camels shrug them off with an equanimity that has long puzzled … Read more
The fish had never seen a mirror before. It had, however, been injected with a small brown mark on its throat — the sort of patch that, to a cleaner wrasse living on a coral reef, signals something rather alarming. A parasite. The kind of thing you’d want off you immediately. The trouble was, with … Read more
Some of the wolf teeth that Amanda Burtt examined have been sitting in museum drawers since the 1840s. They were pulled from British caves and gravel pits by Victorian collectors who had no concept of climate change, no electron microscopes, and certainly no idea that the scratches on a molar could tell you what an … Read more
Nature’s Secrets, Scientifically Told.