Whether loved ones or strangers, wild gorillas in the forests of Rwanda and Congo appear to be fascinated by their dead. Researchers have now recorded three instances of these creatures gathering around, and sometimes even on, gorilla corpses – staring, sniffing, licking, touching, and grooming them for minutes on end.  The first two sightings were

Whales belong in the ocean, right? That may be true today, but cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises) actually descended from four legged mammals that once lived on land. New research published in Current Biology reports the discovery in Peru of an entirely new species of ancestral whale that straddled land and sea, providing insight into the

Getting around in a city can be a lot more dangerous than wide open spaces, and that, it seems, is true for migratory birds as well, especially if they’re in the habit of calling out to each other at night. A new study has analysed the deaths of 70,000 songbirds that died after colliding with

Before there was life, ribonucleic acid (RNA) ruled the primordial soup. Or so the story goes, according to what’s known as the RNA World hypothesis. But it seems we may have been too hasty in leaving out RNA’s more complex cousin, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Chemists from the UK and the US have shown how both

Sure, you might think your average acorn-chomping grey squirrel is sort of cute. But seriously, it’s never going to be giant rainbow squirrel from India level of cute.  It’s not just our opinion either. When amateur photographer Kaushik Vijayan posted some pics of Malabar giant squirrels (Ratufa indica) on Instagram, they quickly wowed the internet.  Vijayan took

For most animals, reproduction is straightforward: some species lay eggs, while others give birth to live babies. But our recent research uncovered a fascinating mix between the two modes of reproduction. In an Australian skink, we observed the first example of both egg-laying and live-bearing within a single litter for any backboned animal. This suggests

Upon first glance, this fossilized sea creature looks more like the Sarlacc from Star Wars’ “Return of the Jedi” than any animal on Earth today. According to a recent study, the Daihua sanqiong – which lived 518 million years ago and was first discovered about a decade ago in southern China’s Yunnan Province – had

Miniaturised frogs form a fascinating but poorly understood group of amphibians. They have been exceptionally prone to taxonomic underestimation because when frogs evolve small body size they start to look remarkably similar – so it is easy to underestimate how diverse they really are. As part of my PhD I have been studying frogs and

Sixty-six million years ago, a massive asteroid crashed into a shallow sea near Mexico. The impact carved out a 90-mile-wide crater and flung mountains of earth into space. Earthbound debris fell to the planet in droplets of molten rock and glass. Ancient fish caught glass blobs in their gills as they swam, gape-mouthed, beneath the

The natural world is a strange and wonderful place. But sometimes biologists come across something that is just… odd. Really, really odd. Case in point: this peculiar arachnid photographed by natural scientist Andreas Kay in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest in July 2017. By all appearances, it looks like it has the tiny head of a black

Two European crows that look quite different from each other are actually diverging from a single species, right before our eyes. In Western Europe, it’s the inky-black carrion crow (Corvus corone). In the east, the grey hooded crow (C. cornix). They overlap in a very narrow zone running along the River Elbe in Germany, where

Forget mutant turtles. Kangaroo rats are the true ninjas of the animal kingdom. A series of four high-speed videos has recently captured these little fighters flipping and kicking in mid-air as they artfully dance around their arch nemesis, the hungry sidewinder rattlesnake (Crotalus cerastes). It’s a battle between two extreme athletes, and the result is a lightning

It starts on a single limb. The leaves grow small, and begin to curl, turning a pale yellow or reddish colour. Within weeks, another apple tree is dead. But that’s not the end of it. Adjacent trees in the orchard often begin to show the same thing. Again, the symptoms may start on a single

The super arrogant seem to like the super bloom. Park officials in California’s Antelope Valley, about 70 miles (110 kilometers) north of Los Angeles, said Tuesday that in recent days someone landed a helicopter in a field of poppies – part of the massive bloom unfolding across the state – and then began a hike.

Human ingenuity is no match for evolution. An exceptional new video shows a tiny tropical lizard breathing underwater from a sort of “scuba tank” on its head. Found in Costa Rica, this intrepid little diver, known as a water anole (Anolis aquaticus), is possibly using its bubble tank to hide from predators and hunt for

Artificial cells created inside the lab have taken another major step forward, with scientists developing cells that are able to produce their own chemical energy and synthesise parts of their own construction. That makes these artificial cells a lot more like real, biological cells – cells that can construct and organise their own building blocks naturally.

Its shorelines comprise the lowest land on Earth, and its waters are nearly 10 times saltier than seawater. But rumours of the Dead Sea’s deadness are nonetheless quite exaggerated, an incredible new discovery shows. The famous ‘Sea of Death‘, bordered by Jordan, Israel, and the West Bank, isn’t actually a sea at all, but rather

We don’t know a lot about the world’s earliest animals, but thanks to their 558 million-year-old fossilised remains, we thought we had a hint as to their appearance. Now, it seems, we were wrong about even that. Scientists at the Australian National University (ANU) have discovered that the iconic Dickinsonia fossils are probably not flat

Thousands of poisonous toads have flooded a South Florida neighborhood, raising fears about the dangers they pose to pets and children, according to local reports. The toads started appearing in Palm Beach Gardens, a city of 55,000, north of Miami, in recent weeks, according CBS Miami. They have been found in people’s gardens, swimming pools,

We all knew the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex was big. But palaeontologists in Canada have just identified the biggest lizard tyrant king yet – its name is Scotty, and boy was it a corker. From nose to tail-tip, Scotty measures 13 metres (43 feet), and would have cracked the scales at 8,800 kilograms (19,400 pounds), based

Researchers have discovered that sun bears can precisely copy each other’s facial expressions in social situations. It’s a bigger deal than you might think, especially for scientists. When humans are in social situations, we often adjust our facial expressions in response to someone else. It’s called facial mimicry, and past a point of sufficient complexity

A house proud mouse, considerately tidying up the workbench of the shed in which it lives, has been captured on video and shared online. The mouse pops out of a box, picks up some screws, nail clippers and a metal chain and carries them back into the box. It’s tempting to think the mouse is

Roughly 12,800 years ago, planet Earth went through a brief cold snap that was unrelated to any ice age. For years, there have been geologists that have argued that this period was caused by an airburst or meteor fragments (known as the Younger Dryas Impact Theory). This event is believed to have caused widespread destruction

A spectacular discovery in south China is shedding more light on the mysterious lifeforms that crawled our planet half a billion years ago. In a shale bed next to Danshui River, palaentologists have excavated around 30,000 fossils dating back to the Cambrian period 518 million years ago. The newly discovered exquisite fossil bed, what is

We know what you’re thinking: why am I looking at a weird handful of pink marbles in a patch of mud? Because it’s a lot cooler than that. Although these little see-through balls really do seem to be marbles upon first glance, they’re actually the eggs of a legless amphibian that belongs to the Chikilidae

It’s an unthinkable ecological nightmare: the scientific prediction that up to 40 percent of the world’s insect species face extinction in the next few decades. This grim tomorrow, forecast in a widely publicised study published last month, threatens to destroy the food web as we know it. But only if the insect apocalypse is as

The hot, dry hillsides of Southern California are normally covered in drab desert scrub. But some of them harbour a colourful secret: millions of flowers that wait for the perfect conditions to bloom. Over the past month, the just-right combination of ample rain from December and stable cooler temperatures arrived in Walker Canyon, which is

In the Gulf of California, an innocent, once-flourishing animal is on the verge of disappearing from the world forever: a victim of nets, and the humans who lay them. The vaquita, the world’s smallest and most endangered cetacean, is almost gone. Last week, scientists announced only about 10 of these porpoises are left in the

It’s been a weird month of sunfish showing up in unexpected places. Take, for instance, this impressive sunfish that was found at the mouth of the Murray River in South Australia last weekend. Local Linette Grzelak uploaded a photo to Facebook, which shows off the creature’s truly impressive size.  (Ralph Foster/iNaturalist/CC BY-NC 4.0) Although massive,

Halfway between the east coast of Africa and Madagascar lies the remote island of Anjouan – a volcanic landmass born in ancient eruptions some four million years ago. Because of Anjouan’s fiery origins, the entire island should be uniformly composed of volcanic basalt: a dark-coloured, lava-derived rock. Should be. But isn’t. For over a century,

Hidden in the evergreen forests of Guinea and Liberia, scientists have discovered a new species of snake that can deliver a venomous stab all without even opening its mouth. It’s an unusual skill that belongs solely to stiletto snakes, which have long fangs they can stick in and out of the corners of their mouths,

The recent discovery of a comb jellyfish with a disappearing butt had us wondering: what other types of weird animal behinds are producing floaters (or sinkers) out in the world? From wriggling deep sea worms that poop from their mouths, to flatworms that have myriad butt holes on their backs, evolution has concocted a bizarre and

If you’ve been on social media this week, you might have noticed Californians going crazy over the sudden appearance of millions of butterflies, flying north en masse through the state. It’s pretty much the exact joyful display of nature that the world needs right now. But it’s also a beautiful and rare sight in a world where insects

Viruses are the IKEA furniture of the living world. In the right kind of cell, a handful of instructions and a few molecular tools can churn out multitudes of infectious Billy bookcases. No DIY builder wants to travel all over town to gather materials – theoretically, germs shouldn’t be any different. Yet a new discovery

Her name is Yuka: an ancient woolly mammoth that last lived some 28,000 years ago, before becoming mummified in the frozen permafrost wastelands of northern Siberia. But now that icy tomb is no longer the end of Yuka’s story. The mammoth’s well-preserved remains were discovered in 2010, and scientists in Japan have now reawakened traces

Nearly 12,600 years ago, during the Late Pleistocene era, a group of humans hunted and killed a giant ground sloth in Argentina, then left the animal’s bones behind, along with their butchering knife. The giant sloth’s bones remained there, at a site called Campo Laborde in the Pampas region, until 2000, when a local farmer

An elusive type of orca, rarely heard of and even more rarely seen, may have just been spotted in the wild. In the icy waters off Cape Horn on the southern tip of Chile, scientists have filmed an entire pod of the legendary “Type D” orca. Over the years, evidence of Type D has been

Language, music, and art often vary between adjacent groups of people, and help us identify not only ourselves but also others. And in recent years rich debates have emerged and spawned research into culture in non-human animals. Scientists first observed chimpanzees using tools more than half a century ago. As this complex behaviour appeared to

As superpowers go, being able to regrow your own head has to be way up there with the best of them, and researchers just discovered four new species of worm that can pull off this amazing regenerative trick. Not only that, but the new study reveals that this ability evolved fairly recently and independently of

Teeth-rattling roars. Earth-shaking stomps. Teeth as long as your forearm. Claws as big as your hand. The mighty Cretaceous king of the ‘tyrant lizards’, Tyrannosaurus rex – and isn’t it just the most adorable thing you have ever seen? Okay, this obviously isn’t a real video of a baby T. rex. It’s a reconstruction by

We should be grateful we have anuses. Some creatures don’t have one, so they have to poop out of their mouths. But as it turns out, there’s also an animal whose poop-chute appears only when it needs to defecate. If you hate having to describe a typical day in your job, spare a thought for

Half a billion years ago, the ocean floor was thought to be completely void of life, an ancient dead zone without the necessary oxygen for survival. Thanks to a lucky new discovery, scientists are now second-guessing that assumption. Hiding in a slab of northern Canada’s ancient sea floor, geologists have uncovered a ‘superhighway’ of prehistoric worm

Nearly 27,000 years ago, a giant ground sloth travelled across a barren, arid landscape in what is now Belize, munching on grassy vegetation and searching for water. A nearby sinkhole may have promised relief, but the creature probably fell in and never came out. In 2014, divers discovered the remains of that giant sloth buried

A large, mysterious fish discovered only recently has been found on a beach in Santa Barbara, California. The find has weirded out biologists, because as far as we know, this huge sunfish is supposed to live in the Southern Hemisphere. The discovery of the hoodwinker sunfish (Mola tecta) was announced in 2017 to much fanfare.

If there’s one place in the world you would expect to find an Alien-esque monster of the deep, it’s Australia. Earlier this month, a group of anglers were fishing in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory when they snagged something unexpected. Stopping the boat, the anglers pulled up a 15-centimetre-long (5.9 inches) worm-like fish,

Scientists have come across a new species of bacteria they’re calling ‘golden death’ – microorganisms that can devour their parasitic roundworm hosts in hours by eating them from the inside out. Rather a gory way to go if you’re a parasitic worm, but these Chryseobacterium nematophagum bacteria could prove very useful in helping control the

Just when we thought octopuses couldn’t be any weirder, it turns out that they and their cephalopod brethren evolve differently from nearly every other organism on the planet. In a surprising twist, in April 2017 scientists discovered that octopuses, along with some squid and cuttlefish species, routinely edit their RNA (ribonucleic acid) sequences to adapt

Scientists in the Galápagos have observed something amazing: the evolution of a completely new species, in the wild, in real-time. And it took just two generations. Back in 2017, genomic sequencing and the analysis of physical characteristics officially confirmed the new species of Darwin’s finch, endemic to a small island called Daphne Major in the