Late afternoon in a Costa Rican cattle pasture, and Christine Dahlin is sitting beneath a large tree with an old-school video camera and a directional microphone, waiting. The yellow-naped amazons that nest here won’t show up for a while yet — they spend their days foraging in small flocks elsewhere, only returning to their breeding … Read more
The nurse sharks swimming through Miami’s glowing coastal waters at night aren’t getting much sleep. Their blood tells the story: melatonin levels suppressed, circadian rhythms disrupted, all because the city never really goes dark. For the first time, researchers have measured the hormone in wild sharks and found that artificial light is throwing their biological … Read more
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
Jean Giacomotto had 18 days to find an answer. Two newborns, one in Australia, one in Germany, carried genetic mutations nobody had seen before. Each baby also carried a known deadly mutation for spinal muscular atrophy, making them prime candidates for treatment. But the novel mutations were wildcards, and without knowing whether they were harmful, … 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
Researchers hovering consumer drones over whale blowholes in northern Norway have detected cetacean morbillivirus circulating in Arctic waters for the first time – a pathogen linked to mass strandings of whales and dolphins worldwide since its discovery in 1987. The approach marks a shift toward non-invasive health surveillance for marine mammals in regions where traditional … Read more
Fossil Graveyard In Qatar Recasts The History Of The Arabian Gulf The sun-drenched, rocky desert of southwestern Qatar holds a powerful contradiction: a vast, 21-million-year-old cemetery of marine mammal bones. This fossil site, locally known as Al Maszhabiya, or the “dugong cemetery,” dates back to the Early Miocene epoch and has yielded a discovery that … Read more
The throat bone did not lie. After decades of paleontologists insisting that Nanotyrannus was just a scrawny adolescent Tyrannosaurus rex, a microscopic examination of a single hyoid bone has proven them wrong. The 18-foot predator was fully grown when it died, a distinct species hunting alongside its gigantic cousins in the final days before the … Read more
Nature’s Secrets, Scientifically Told.