Earth’s lost eighth continent, Zealandia, sank into the sea between 50 and 35 million years ago. Today, we know the tiny fraction of it that remains above the waves as New Zealand.   But before most of Zealandia disappeared – about 60 million years ago – ancient penguins walked upon the 2-million-square-mile continent (5.18 million square

It was 1952, and Alan Turing was about to reshape humanity’s understanding of biology. In a landmark paper, the English mathematician introduced what became known as the Turing pattern – the notion that the dynamics of certain uniform systems could give rise to stable patterns when disturbed.   Such ‘order from disturbance’ has become the

Hundreds of elephants that died mysteriously in Botswana’s famed Okavango Delta succumbed to cyanobacteria poisoning, the wildlife department revealed on Monday. The landlocked southern African country boasts the world’s largest elephant population, estimated at around 130,000.   More than 300 of the pachyderms have mysteriously died since March, with their intact tusks ruling out the

Funnel webs are considered one of Australia’s most fearsome spiders, but their ability to kill humans is by accident rather than design, our new research shows. In findings published today, we reveal how the highly toxic and quick-acting venom of male funnel-web spiders is likely to have developed as a defence against predators.   When

The fall equinox comes this Tuesday at 9:30 am ET (1:30 pm UTC). Although not the best time to balance an egg (that’s an old wives’ tale), the equinox heralds the coming of autumn, cooler temperatures, and shorter days for the Northern Hemisphere, which houses about 90 percent of Earth’s population.   For the Southern Hemisphere, it signifies the opposite:

Australia is home to some of the world’s most dangerous wildlife. Anyone who spends time outdoors in eastern Australia is wise to keep an eye out for snakes, spiders, swooping birds, crocodiles, deadly cone snails and tiny toxic jellyfish.   But what not everybody knows is that even some of the trees will get you.

High above the Arctic Circle lies a group of remote Siberian islands where ivory traders and scientists brave sub-zero temperatures to search for extinct creatures preserved in the melting permafrost.   Those Lyakhovsky Islands just yielded an unprecedented find: a perfectly preserved adult cave bear – with its nose, teeth, and internal organs still intact. Scientists think

A sudden and potentially unprecedented mass die-off of migratory birds in New Mexico and elsewhere appears to have killed hundreds of thousands of birds, and perhaps even millions, scientists estimate.   In recent weeks, biologists and ornithologists have watched in shock and despair as hundreds of dead birds were discovered in numerous spots across the

A 100-million-year-old chunk of amber has revealed the oldest-ever sample of animal sperm, and each individual cell is enormously long. Even more impressive, this giant sperm – several times larger than human sperm – comes from a shrimp-like crustacean smaller than a poppyseed.   Just shy of 0.6 millimetres, this ancient bivalve belongs to a

We don’t know exactly how they do it, we just know it’s an amazing gift. For decades, evidence has shown that all sorts of animals can sense magnetic fields and even use them to navigate their way around the planet.   This mysterious ability, called magnetoreception, is something that helps animals to make long-haul migrations,

During a hot summer night in the Australian state of New South Wales, ecologist Heloise Gibb and her team were hunting for scorpions in some arid scrubland. Using special UV-proof glasses and UV flashlights, they were looking for a flicker of fluorescence indicating a scorpion, which have become abundant in the damaged, sandy deserts of

From bird feathers to fruit skins, the natural world has two main ways of displaying colour: through pigment substances that provide selective colour absorption, or through structural colour – the use of microscopic structures to control light reflection.   Now scientists have devised a computer model that explains why the brightest matte structural colours in

At first, the idea of a walking fish sounds ridiculous – but such hybrid creatures have played a key role in the evolution of the animal kingdom on Earth. Now, new research has shown that more fish than we ever realised may be able to walk about on land.   That’s according to a detailed

Picking the kids up from school takes on a different meaning for crocodylian parents. In this photo, taken by India-based photographer Dhritiman Mukherjee, a male freshwater gharial shows us why. Bobbing in the waters of northern India’s National Chambal Sanctuary, the croc waits as more than 100 of his month-old children clamber onto his back for safe

According to ancient legend, a beautiful maiden named Ashima drowned in a river, and turned into stone. This, it has been said for centuries, is how China’s stunning Stone Forest of Shilin first took shape.   According to new research, however, there’s another explanation for the phenomenon that gives stone forests their surreal and otherworldly

Our cells still hold tightly onto many secrets about their origins. But recently discovered giant viruses may hold clues to one such secret – the mysterious emergence of a cell’s main store of instructions, the nucleus.   The presence of a nucleus distinguishes our eukaryotic cells from other cellular life forms. Bacteria and archaea tend

Global animal, bird and fish populations have plummeted more than two-thirds in less than 50 years due to rampant over-consumption, experts said Thursday in a stark warning to save nature in order to save ourselves.   Human activity has severely degraded three quarters of all land and 40 percent of Earth’s oceans, and our quickening

Archaeologists in hard hats and face masks carefully remove earth from around enormous bones at the site of Mexico City’s new airport, where construction work has uncovered a huge trove of mammoth skeletons.   The remains of dozens of the extinct giants and other prehistoric creatures have been found in Zumpango on the northern edge

To the innocent eyes of animals, the appearance of humans on the horizon represents more of an existential threat than the vast environmental upheaval of previous climate change up until now, new research suggests.   According to a new study, mammal extinctions tracing back as far as 126,000 years ago have had more to do

It often seems impossible to know what’s going on in Fido’s head as he lounges on his dog bed. But a handful of new studies offer surprising insights about how our canine companions age, perceive human speech, and find their way home.   A study published last month showed that dogs understand verbal communication just like

A little baby horse named Kurt is a symbol of renewed hope for the survival of his kind. Born on 6 August 2020, he is the world’s first ever successfully cloned Przewalski’s horse, an endangered wild horse native to the steppes of central Asia.   What makes Kurt even more exciting is that he was

Two hundred ancient mammoth skeletons have been discovered beneath an airport construction site north of Mexico City – the largest collection of mammoth bones ever found. Archaeologists at Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History first realised the area might hide mammoth remains after they found two human-dug mammoth traps in November as part of

Hearing loss in humans can make life challenging in our hustle-bustle landscape. But when your world is literally as silent as a grave, being hard of hearing just might be something of a superpower.   For naked mole rats and their cousins, the loss of genes that would usually amplify noises is another extraordinary adaptation

Humans wouldn’t survive two minutes in space, but in 2007, two species of tardigrades were released into space and then collected again – still alive. Tardigrades are a group of tiny invertebrate species that live all over the world – you can probably find one yourself on a piece of moss in your back garden

A shark with teeth as big as your hand has to be huge. But when teeth are all you have to go on, you’ll need to think outside the box to work out what the rest of the long-extinct monster looked like.   It turns out the pelagic terror referred to as Megalodon might have

While mighty oaks do fall, there are a rare few that can stand for nearly a millennium, even under harsh conditions.  Radiocarbon dating has now revealed the oldest temperate hardwood tree in the world sits atop a steep rocky slope in a remote mountain belt of the Mediterranean.   Here, on this rocky precipice in Italy,

When an earthquake struck the Italian mountain town of L’Aquila in April 2009, few people would have been thinking that carbon dioxide had anything to do with it. But geologists were on the case straight away.   Immediately after the L’Aquila earthquake, a team from the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology started measuring

Several years ago, a remotely operated vehicle was descending down into a freshwater cave system, hidden deep under the Czech Republic, when it came to an abrupt end. Not the end of the cave, that is, but the end of its cable.   Now, new estimates taken from up at the surface suggest we’d need

A bubble of methane gas, swelling beneath Siberia’s melting permafrost for who knows how long, has burst open to form an impressive 50-metre-deep (164-foot-deep) crater. The giant hole was first spotted by a TV crew flying overhead, and, according to The Siberian Times, when scientists went to investigate, they found chunks of ice and rock thrown hundreds

Animals have been hibernating for a long, long time, a new study shows. Researchers have analysed 250 million-year-old fossils and found evidence that the pig-sized mammal relation, a genus called Lystrosaurus, hibernated much like bears and bats do today.   Finding signs of shifts in metabolism rates in fossils is just about impossible under normal conditions –

There’s an enormous variety of life thriving deep beneath Earth’s surface. A new analysis of two major groups of subsurface microbes has now revealed that their evolutionary path to life in the dark has been more curious than we expected.   In our planet’s first 2 billion years of existence, there was no oxygen in

For a single cell, the human body is a gargantuan maze of tissues, chemicals and capillaries, crammed full with trillions of other cells all bustling about like commuters at the world’s busiest train station. Somehow, amidst all this hubbub, most cells still manage to reach their destinations.   How do they do it? Many cells have a

As a source of clean energy, wind farms come with many benefits – but they can be a danger to local birds. A new study suggests a small tweak to the turbine design could make a big difference in terms of avian safety, and all it takes is a paint job.   In an experiment run

An 80-million-year-old embryo has revealed some unexpected features of the most titanic animals to ever have walked the Earth. Sauropods, such as Brontosauruses, which lumbered their way through the Jurassic and Cretaceous ages, are well known for their impressive size and long necks. But very little is known about their young.   “The preservation of

Just before a tiny pup died during the last ice age, it ate a piece of meat from one of Earth’s last woolly rhinos.  Researchers made this discovery while doing a necropsy (an animal autopsy) on the mummified remains of the ice age puppy. After finding an undigested slab of skin with yellow fur in the puppy’s stomach, researchers

Sometimes our eyes play tricks on us, and sometimes, we play tricks on them. Optical illusions have entranced neuroscientists for decades, but these false messages have probably been going on much longer than we’ve been studying them.   New research has found the eyes of fruit flies are just as easily fooled by static visual

At some point in Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history, its entirely liquid iron core cooled enough to form a solid ball in the centre. Today, our planet’s core consists of a solid iron inner core surrounded by a molten iron outer core, but pinning down exactly when this change occurred has proven quite difficult.   Estimates range

A chance discovery during a hike in Grand Canyon National Park in 2016 ended up revealing strange footprints left by something that also walked there once, long, long ago. So long ago, in fact, that these ancient tracks – left approximately 313 million years ago – represent the earliest footprints ever found in this epic,

For half a century scientists feared that the Somali elephant shrew had vanished from the face of the Earth. No one had seen so much as a whisker. But the tiny mammal with its probing trunk-like nose was quietly thriving in the arid, rocky landscape of the Horn of Africa, researchers said Tuesday.   The

The mantis shrimp is quite a fearsome foe. While they’re neither shrimp nor mantis, this marine crustacean, measuring about just 10 centimetres (4 inches) long, has incredible eyes that can see cancer, and a club-like hand that can throw the fastest punches in the ocean.   We’re talking 23 metres per second, and creating 1,500 newtons

For all the little creatures out there, falling water can be a big hazard. When water drops are a large percentage of your body size, you need clever adaptations to survive even commonly occurring phenomena such as rain. So even greater volumes of falling water, like a waterfall, may as well be a wall to

Radiation that would reduce the DNA inside our own cells into genetic confetti is no match for the microscopic tough-guy known as a tardigrade, and we just got closer to understanding just how these critters are so tough.   Their protection works in part due to the shielding provided by a special ‘damage suppression’ protein

While bacteria are often associated with icky germs, they really are so much more than that. They help us digest things, feed trees nitrogen, play a huge role in cycling Earth’s nutrients, and survive staggering extremes. Recently, we discovered some of these incredibly tough and tiny packages of life can even live off air alone.

A gigantic fleet of floating rocks, spewed up from an underwater volcano in the Pacific Ocean, floated across the waves for thousands of miles. Eventually, it made it all the way to Australia, then started on a new project: revitalising the world’s largest (and very threatened) coral reef system.   This unlikely chain of events may

An international team of marine scientists have discovered 30 new species of invertebrates in deep water surrounding the Galapagos, the Ecuadoran archipelago’s national park authorities announced Monday.   The deep-sea experts discovered fragile coral and sponge communities including 10 bamboo corals, four octocorals, one brittle star and 11 sponges – as well as four new

If you’ve ever looked up during a thunderstorm and glimpsed a red jellyfish sitting high in the sky, you weren’t hallucinating. These tentacle-like spurts of red lightning are called sprites. They’re ultrafast bursts of electricity that crackle through the upper regions of the atmosphere – between 37 and 50 miles (60 and 80 kilometres) up

A species of frog from the Brazilian rainforest has become the first amphibian shown to live in a harem, where one male mates with two females who remain loyal to him. So-called polygyny is thought to be the most common mating system among animals and has previously been found in bony fishes, reptiles, mammals, birds,