Even the tiniest organisms can make it to the big leagues. The number one fastest animal movement in the world now belongs to an ant no bigger than the tip of your finger. Ominously named the Dracula ant (Mystrium camillae), this minuscule species is shy and elusive, a subterranean predator that enjoys sucking the blood

Anyone who’s seen a gecko will likely know they can climb walls. But these common lizards can also run across water nearly as fast as they can move on solid ground. Yet while we know how geckos scale smooth vertical surfaces using countless tiny hairs on their feet called setae, how they manage to avoid

Earth is not the home you think it is. Far below the scant surface spaces we inhabit, the planet is teeming with an incredibly vast and deep ‘dark biosphere‘ of subterranean lifeforms that scientists are only just beginning to comprehend. Hidden throughout this subsurface realm, some of the world’s deepest and oldest organisms thrive in

The name says it all, really. With the exception of some orange hairs in the rear, the black mantled howler monkey (Alouatta palliata) is predominantly covered in – you guessed it – pitch black fur. This is true for all the black howler monkeys in the forests of Central America and the north of South

A relaxed-looking juvenile Hawaiian monk seal lounges near a sandy white beach on some green foliage. Its eyes are half-closed, and it has a serene expression on its face. But the seal’s calm demeanor is surprising. Why? Well, there’s a long, black-and-white eel dangling from its right nostril. “It’s just so shocking,” Claire Simeone, a

She squeaks in ultrasound, “I love you”. He chirrups back “Right back at ya’, sweetheart”. It’s all in the dulcet tones of California mice, but the meaning is clear. Then one of them spends time with another mouse spouse. Later, partners reunited, there’s tension. Somebody barks. A high pitched roar. They’ll make up later, but

Salamanders are, by their very nature, slippery creatures. Perhaps none so slippery as the mysterious ‘leopard eel’ – an amphibian spotted intermittently in the waters of Florida over the last few decades that somehow managed to elude scientific study. Until now, that is. Ecologist Sean Graham of Sul Ross State University in Texas and colleagues

We’re now increasingly aware of the microplastic fragments polluting our oceans, but a new study shows just how quickly these tiny particles can find their way into marine life – it takes a mere six hours for billions of pieces of material to spread inside aquatic animals. The unfortunate critters involved in the research were

You only wish you could be this fabulous millions of years after you die. Precious stones recovered from the opal fields of Australia have turned out not just to be opalised fossils – but the opalised fossils of a dinosaur previously unknown to palaeontology. It’s called Weewarrasaurus pobeni – named for the Wee Warra opal

Freezing temperatures and industrial activity may sound like a recipe for disaster, but sometimes, beautiful things come from strange places. In the frigid cold of winter, two industrial power plants on the outskirts of a small town in Nebraska have caused a rare and unusual weather event. For more than a day, residents living downwind

Jumping spiders are already among the most adorable members of the arachnid order, but we’re ready to give them the prize, officially. A species of ant-mimicking jumping spider has just been found suckling its babies on milk. You know what else does that? Kitties. Doggos. Mousies. But Toxeus magnus is much more diligent than mouse

If classic monster movies and old science experiments are to be believed, life begins with a spark. Not everybody is convinced by this kind of origin story, so the search continues for sources of energy capable of transforming a prebiotic soup into a life-generating dish. Maybe the secret ingredient isn’t anything more shocking than a

The outer layer of the Earth, the solid crust we walk on, is made up of broken pieces, much like the shell of a broken egg. These pieces, the tectonic plates, move around the planet at speeds of a few centimetres per year. Every so often they come together and combine into a supercontinent, which

This week, a Holstein by the name of Knickers captured the heart of the Internet by standing horns and shoulders above a herd of cattle on a farm in Australia. And there’s no arguing that the lad is large. At the shoulder, Knickers stands a mighty 6’4″ (193 centimetres), which means he’s two inches taller

In the land down under, sticking out in a crowd is rarely a good thing. Australians have a habit of cutting “tall poppies” down to size, frowning on those overachievers who are too big for their own boots. An exception has been made for Knickers the giant cow, long may he reign. Right now, Knickers is

Could nature’s smallest organisms help us to combat rising CO2 levels and even oil spills? Strange as it might seem, the answer might be yes, with research into newly discovered deep-sea microbes suggesting these tiny critters possess a keen appetite for pollutants. The microbes – collected in the Gulf of California, around 2,000 metres (6,562

Spider silk is well known as one of the strongest natural materials in existence, but now scientists have a better understanding of why – and it’s all to do with the old adage of strength in numbers. Through an atomic force microscope trained on the silk of a brown recluse spider (Loxosceles reclusa) – which essentially

Scientists have an imprecise understanding of the obscure phenomenon of mass whale strandings, when large numbers of the marine mammals suddenly beach themselves – often their final acts. There are, of course, many reasons a whale would find itself on a beach: illness or injury that leaves them at the mercy of ocean currents and

It didn’t look much like the dainty unicorns of myth and legend, but the extinct unicorn of Siberia is even more entrancing for palaeontologists. Now, for the first time, scientists have analysed its DNA – and realised everyone had been wrong about the mysterious beast. The ancient rhinoceros didn’t die off 200,000 years ago, before

Before the dinosaurs we’re mostly familiar with, there was a group of smaller ancestors that we know very little about. But now archaeologists have discovered three new well-preserved skeletons in Brazil, and it’s teaching us more about this particular branch of the dino family tree. The skeletons fit into a new dinosaur species that’s been

The willow warbler is not one to stop and smell the flowers. Weighing in at a mere 10 grams (3.5 ounces), this restless little songbird regularly traverses multiple continents, flying thousands of kilometres and taking remarkably few breaks. In fact, researchers in Sweden have now determined this epic trek by the Siberian willow warbler (Phylloscopus trochilus yakutensis) constitutes the

Penises come in many shapes and sizes in the animal kingdom. But usually they’re only ever found on the sperm-owner of a species.  In the strange case of a tribe of cave-dwelling winged insects found in Africa and Brazil though, it’s the egg-laying females who grow a phallus – albeit, not one that ejaculates sperm,

Some corners of the internet are in a bit of a tizzy after a Texas resident allegedly discovered a writhing, brain-like mass of worms in a puddle following several days of rainfall. According to Pen News Agency, which seems to supply content primarily to, ahem, British tabloids with a spotty track record when it comes

There’s a forest in Massachusetts that for nearly 30 years has hosted the world’s longest running soil-warming experiment, measuring how hotter temperatures impact the tiny life-forms that live in the dirt. With the way climate change is going, you could say the future itself is buried in that heated dirt. But our unknown tomorrows aren’t

A five-year long investigation into the criminal trade of tiger parts in Czechia culminated in the discovery of a horrific animal slaughterhouse in Prague, and shows illegal trafficking in big cats isn’t just a problem in Asia. Back in July, inspectors with the Czech Environmental Inspectorate (CEI) led over 200 police and customs officers in

A fisherman has shared a video of a surprise drawn up from the depths of the ocean. Included in the catch from a deep-sea trawling expedition was a sight most people never see in the wild: a wriggling worm that lives in the deep, dark ocean, where little light penetrates. The footage was shared on

The Australian wombat has one of nature’s most bizarre superpowers. This pudgy, bear-like marsupial is the only animal we know of that can produce cube-shaped poos. These unique droppings have long been a biological mystery, although biologists have partially attributed the shape to the incredible dryness of wombat poop. But now we have a new

If you want to design something right, look to nature for inspiration – that’s the message from scientists who have produced a new type of brush, based on a detailed analysis of a cat’s tongue and its ultra-effective grooming capabilities. In particular, the team looked at certain types of papillae on the tongues of cats,

One of the largest and strangest engineered structures on Earth is almost completely hidden from the world, unless you know where to look. Buried in the Caatinga vegetation of northeastern Brazil, scientists have uncovered the true scale of a vast array of some 200 million termite mounds covering an area the size of Great Britain.

The Earth is wonderfully weird. From tiny puddle-dwelling creatures that can survive in outer space to a paint so dark that your eyes can’t actually even see it, Earth is filled with plenty of strange and incredible things – both natural and made by us. Here are a handful of things on this planet that

Microscopic organisms found in dirt collected from a hike through Nova Scotia mean we’re going to have to add another branch to the tree of life. The strange organisms simply don’t fit into the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, or any other kingdom we’ve classified up until now. The tiny critters in question represent two

From the video, the amorphous blob seems to stretch on for a mile as it snakes through the water, dwarfing the two divers who surround it. For 48-year-old videographer Steve Hathaway, the October 25 sighting near a small, volcanic island about 30 miles (48 kilometres) off New Zealand’s northernmost point put an end to a

In the far North of the globe, hidden under continental sheet ice nearly a kilometre thick, geologists have found evidence that, not so long ago, Greenland was rocked by a collision with a massive meteorite. The proof? A huge impact crater, 31 kilometres (19.3 miles) in diameter. It is the 25th largest impact crater ever

It’s a common question that experts say they get all the time: can big cats purr like household cats? If only there was a simple response. Even though scientists have been debating the answer for well over a century, today the situation is far from clear. From what we know so far, the answer centres

Over 100 captured whales are being held in small, crowded enclosures in a so-called ‘whale jail’ off the coast of Russia, where they await suspected sale to Chinese theme parks, according to local media reports. The discovery of the marine containment facility near the city of Nakhodka in Russia’s south-east is being investigated by Russian

The evolutionary arms race between predator and prey has given rise to many impressive defence mechanisms; as it turns out, the lowly moth is no exception. These unassuming creatures may not have the charming appearance of their butterfly cousins, but their furry facade conceals some tricks that would impress the most advanced military division. Over

An unusual warbler in Pennsylvania has been discovered harbouring an incredible genetic secret. He’s the hybrid of not two, but three different species of bird. His mother was a hybrid of two warblers – and his father was a warbler of an entirely different third genus. “It’s extremely rare,” said ornithologist David Toews of Cornell

There’s no easy way to rate dog intelligence. It can be focused on more than one thing. As canine psychologist Stanley Coren wrote back in the ’90s, there’s adaptive intelligence (i.e., figuring stuff out), working intelligence (i.e. following orders), and instinctive intelligence (i.e. innate talent) – not to mention spatial intelligence, kinesthetic intelligence, interpersonal intelligence,

At first glance, you might miss it. But among Central Park’s usual waterfowl crowd, there appears to be a new addition. And people are flocking to see him. A single, male Mandarin duck flaunts his multi-coloured feathers as he swims out among a posse of mallards and wood ducks. He’s not a local, and it’s

The best scientists are the ones that ask lots of questions, even when they may seem absurd to the rest of us – like, how many mosquitoes can you squeeze into just one cubic centimetre? The answer may seem like a meaningless pursuit, but there’s actually a point – it could help us in our

We all know that corvids (ravens and crows) are no bird brains. Earlier this year, they stunned scientists with their ability to tear paper into a tool to obtain food. Now another bird has followed suit: Goffin’s cockatoos (Cacatua goffiniana) have shown that they can tear cardboard into the shape of a tool to get

Fireworks are a brilliant way to celebrate special occasions such as New Year’s Eve and Guy Fawkes Night, as well as big sporting events and independence days – right? Not if you happen to be an animal. All animals, domesticated and wild, are hardwired by evolution to find loud noises frightening. It is an automatic

It’s a mystery that scientists have been trying to solve for nearly a century. How did the world’s smallest flightless bird end up on a remote island in the middle of the South Atlantic? The Inaccessible Island rail (Atlantisia rogersi) is a tiny, flightless bird – 15 to 17 centimetres long – that is only

With an underwater jet pack, a black wet suit and a tiny briefcase laden with wires, Rui Matsumoto looked like a spy on a sabotage mission. In truth, the scientist was on a different sort of assignment in the Galápagos Islands, though the stakes were equally high. Matsumoto had come to perform sonograms on 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

A mud puddle doesn’t really sound all that threatening, but there’s one in California’s Imperial County that’s so troublesome, an emergency had to be declared earlier this year. It’s called the Niland Geyser and it’s exactly that, a geyser of bubbling mud. But there’s a strange twist – this menacing puddle has been slowly creeping across

Giant pandas are by nature solitary animals, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t well-versed in the language of love. Far from it. When spring arrives and these giant creatures get frisky, effective communication is one of biggest turn-ons. And these pandas know exactly how to express their interest. By recording giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) before,

Almost on the cusp of the Mariana Trench, before it plunges down into the very bowels of the ocean, scientists have found something rare and wonderful. Sometime in 2015, an underwater volcano experienced a massive eruption, spewing molten magma into the surrounding ocean. As the incredibly hot magma meets the water, it begins to rapidly