Since time immemorial, Earth’s poles have resembled frozen wastelands. Life can and does exist there, but there are sound reasons why humans and most other animals cling to the safety of more hospitable climates closer to the equator.   They were not always wastelands, though. We know that in our planet’s ancient past, conditions were

With the power to make even the most arachnid-wary go “awww”, peacock spiders took the internet by storm. Their online popularity spurred a flurry of new species discoveries over the last decade, and now we have seven more of these cutelings to admire.   Peacock spiders (genus Maratus) are famed for the outrageously flamboyant butts of

After reports of two dogs testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 in Hong Kong, the most recent news to cause alarm among animal owners is that of a cat in Belgium with apparent symptoms of the virus that causes COVID-19.   The owner of the cat had recently tested positive for the virus. It is reported that

It’s fair to say that the world has had more than enough of viruses right now. Unfortunately, the converse is not necessarily true. The incredible vastness of the virosphere is hard to overstate. While several thousand kinds of virus have been studied in detail, scientists say we haven’t even scratched the surface. There could be

Around a quarter of a billion years ago, the vast majority of species on land and sea were wiped out in The Great Dying, thanks to a series of volcanic eruptions spewing out noxious greenhouse gases.   With the discovery that land animals had a big head start in this tremendous mass extinction, researchers are

Just like in humans, males across many mammal species don’t live as long as their female counterparts, and it’s not because they age differently, biologically speaking. “We’ve known for a long time that women generally live longer than men, but were surprised to find that the [difference] in lifespan between the sexes was even more

Along the banks of a river of human epithelial cells, flowing across your tongue, many communities of bacteria have made their homes. Just as human cities organise into areas with different types of communities and purposes, so, it turns out, do these miniature equivalents congregate in your mouth.   Spherical, oxygen loving Streptococci species (green) loiter

Canadian artist Julie Laurin recently started a livestream of tardigrades — microscopic, eight-legged micro-animals also known as “water bears” — wriggling around on Twitch. And it’s exactly the kind of thing we need right now.   You can watch a full, narrated hour of tardigrade action on Laurin’s Twitch channel. The stream, first spotted by

Ever wondered how a growing horseshoe crab wriggles its way out of a shell that’s grown too small? A new timelapse video lets you watch the fascinating process in action as a young horseshoe crab moults, leaving you wondering how it even fit into the shell it leaves behind.   In the wild, this process

A search for the ‘missing link’ in the chain of the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 has uncovered two close cousins of the new coronavirus in shipments of pangolins being smuggled into China.   It’s important to note that the discovery by researchers from across Hong Kong and China falls well short of identifying these precious mammals as the

Earth didn’t always have this much oxygen. Roughly 2.4 billion years ago, the rise of cyanobacteria and the shifting of tectonic plates breathed new life into our planet, tipping off a Great Oxidation Event (GOE).   The surge of oxygen-hungry life that followed didn’t last for long. Today, many scientists think the evolution of life

A long, long time ago, in what is now the southern United States, several giant dinosaurs, including a relative of the T. rex, were once on the hunt for prey. In their shadow, almost 70 million years later, palaeontologists have now shed light upon a much smaller competitor running underfoot. Standing only one metre tall

When it comes to squids, you just can’t keep them down. Not just because they’re slippery, but also because they have an incredible genetic editing ability – it lets them tweak their own RNA long after it’s left the nucleus.   Here’s what that means. Genes, in humans at least, mostly stay unchanging until they’re

The earliest known ancestor of most familiar forms of animal life living on the planet today appears to have been identified in outback Australia, revealing a strange, worm-like organism that deserves our respect and gratitude.   Ikaria wariootia, a sluggish blob about the size of a grain of rice, might not look like much, but

Scientists have uncovered a splintered remnant of Earth’s continental crust from millions of years ago, embedded in the isolated wilderness of northern Canada. Baffin Island, located in between the Canadian mainland and Greenland, is a vast Arctic expanse covering over 500,000 square kilometres (almost 200,000 square miles), making it the fifth largest island in the

Butterflies have taken the colour black to an entirely new level. The scales that shingle this insect’s dark wings are nearly on par with the blackest of black coatings made by humans – except they’re only a fifth of the thickness.   At just a few microns wide, these natural nanostructures absorb 99.94 percent of

The way oral bacteria sets up shop in our mouths is not unlike how we humans settle into our cities, a new study has found. There’s a reason bacteria are said to live in ‘colonies’, and the more we learn about how these tiny architects build their communities, the more familiar their behavior seems to

A rare freshwater reserve has been discovered underneath the sea off the coast of the South Island of New Zealand, which could help head off future droughts and mitigate the impact of climate change in the coming years.   The offshore freshened groundwater (OFG) was discovered through a combination of seismology and electromagnetic wave scanning

At night, they rise. As the Sun disappears over the horizon, a vast movement takes place in the world’s oceans, as countless sea creatures begin the long trek upwards towards the surface waters above.   They do not stay long. When the Sun rises, bringing light and the threat of watchful surface predators, they will

Since the 1970s, a parasitic worm that infects fish, squid, whales, dolphins and sometimes even us has increased globally by 283-fold, according to a new meta analysis. That’s no small amount, and yet because this creature is so tiny and the oceans so vast, it’s somehow evaded our notice until now. Not even the researchers

Back when fearsome dinosaurs roamed the land, an unimpressive avian, about the size of a very small duck, somehow survived alongside them – eking out a life along a prehistoric European seashore.   It had the long slender legs of a shorebird, and a face like a chicken, according to the Cambridge University researchers, who

Published in 1859, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species made a number of bold claims about the nature of evolution – including the suggestion that an animal species with greater diversity in its line will produce more sub-species, too.   This assumption is not as obvious as you might think at first. Only a

The four-limbed animals of the world have several things in common. Spines. Bilateral symmetry. And most of us have (or, in the case of birds, had) five digits at the end of each of our four limbs.   When and how these digits emerged in animals has been something of a mystery. Palaeontologists have just

In the crystal-clear shallows of Cape Town, South Africa, a dwarf sperm whale (Kogia sima) was recently filmed attempting to flee an aggressive seal by releasing a ‘smoke bomb’ of dark, ink-like fluid.   As the whale rushes away from its oncoming predator and towards the shore, its wake suddenly becomes clouded with a reddish-brown

Stand on the wind-swept crags lining Scotland’s western coast today, and you’d be lucky to spot a puffin or two. But the closer we look, the more evidence we find it was once home to an incredibly diverse array of ancient beasts.   The discovery of new sets of fossilised tracks has expanded the list

Life can often seem rare and fragile, but we living things have well and truly infiltrated Earth. Microorganisms just keep cropping up in unexpected times and extreme places, the latest of those being deep below the seafloor, in Earth’s lower crust.   “The lower ocean crust is one of the last frontiers of the exploration

A hundred million years ago, in the middle of the Mesozoic era, Earth was home to all sorts of dinosaurs – those both great, like the long-necked sauropod, and small, like the hummingbird.   As out-of-place as that sounds, palaeontologists now think the tiniest dinosaur in the Mesozoic was even more miniature than the smallest

A chunk of rock that had been buried in the ground for millions of years has become a new clock for understanding Earth’s rotation. Analysis of a fossilised Cretaceous-era bivalve shell has revealed that our planet’s days were half an hour shorter 70 million years ago.   In turn, knowing this can now help scientists

A bacterial species that survives by ‘breathing’ rock has intrigued scientists for decades, even though the inner workings of its mysterious cellular respiration technique have remained far from clear.   Now, in a new study investigating the strange habits of the bacterium Shewanella oneidensis, researchers have discovered that the microbe’s ability to ‘breathe’ by transporting

As macabre as it seems, it’s not exactly a secret that in some species of shark the unborn dine on their siblings while still developing in the womb. But it turns out we don’t know the half of it. A novel kind of ultrasound device has provided biologists with a detailed view of this common

We already know dogs are amazing creatures, and scientists just discovered another talent our canine friends seem to possess: they appear to be able to sniff out the heat of other animals through their cold snouts.   It’s all apparently down to the rhinarium – that area of smooth, furless skin around the nostrils of

Ancient fern-like creatures known as rangeomorphs might not have been as lonely as we once imagined. Filaments discovered in half-a-billion year old rocks in Newfoundland, Canada, suggest clusters of these early animals could have connected up through a network of thin fibres.   Exactly what these fibres did isn’t all that clear. Suggestions range from

A baby bumblebee in the hive is protected from the outside world like a fetus in the womb. Yet when contaminated foods are brought back to the colony, that isolation is put at risk.   New research suggests when young larvae are exposed to pesticides it may cause lasting and irreversible damage to their brains

A sloth’s umbilical cord can be a lifeline for its young in more ways than one. When giving birth, it can stop a slippery newborn from falling right out of the tree, sort of like a natural bungee cord.   A rare glimpse of just such an incredible moment was recently caught on camera in

A microscopic look at dinosaur cartilage from roughly 75 million years ago has turned up a cluster of exquisitely-preserved cells, and they just might contain something rather familiar.   Dusting off the skulls of two juvenile duck-billed dinosaurs (Hypacrosaurus stebingeri), shelved after their discovery in the 1980s, researchers noticed a bunch of tiny circular structures

Up until now, only human beings and other great apes have demonstrated an ability to understand probabilities – being able to weigh up the odds based on the available data, or statistical inference, as it’s formally called. Now, for the first time, a parrot species has demonstrated this skill.   Tests on six kea (Nestor

Monty the python’s eyes ended up being bigger than her stomach when the snake swallowed an entire beach towel whole. A video that went viral this week shows doctors at the SASH animal hospital in New South Wales, Australia prying the beach towel out of the snake’s belly while it was under anesthesia.   They included

When it was very young, the planet Earth looked rather different from the one we know and love today. For one, it had supercontinents – when the landmasses we currently live on were arranged in various configurations as they were pushed around by tectonic movements.   But there may have been a period when there

For the swamp wallaby, mothering is a full-time business. While every other mammal on Earth gets a break between pregnancies, this particular species of Australian marsupial (Wallabia bicolor) is the only one to continuously have a bun in the oven. Sometimes, they even have two.   Before an expectant wallaby gives birth, her body is

Once upon a time, a small worm mucking about on the Cambrian seafloor did something really, really careless: it lost its legs. As the old saying goes, “use it or lose it”. Since the worm – a squirmy creature belonging to the Facivermis genus – was not using its legs for locomotion, it evolved into a more

Seagulls have an eye for good food, and while beggars can’t be choosers, all things being equal, they’re more interested in that tasty morsel you’re clutching than a scrap of food simply lying on the ground.   New research in the United Kingdom suggests herring gulls (Larus argentatus) tend to go for edibles already handled

Our attempts to ‘seed’ clouds with extra snow or rain may actually be working, a new study suggests, although perhaps not quite as much as some had hoped. It may sound like something straight out of science fiction, but cloud seeding has been around since the 1940s. Despite the fact that this form of ‘weather

Strange, vein-like shadows imprinted in ancient rocks are some of the most important clues yet in piecing together the timeline of photosynthesis. At 1 billion years old, the tiny fossils are the oldest example of green algae we’ve ever discovered.   Even from all those aeons ago, the fossils show evidence of characteristics in common

Some truths about the Universe and our experience in it seem immutable. The sky is up. Gravity sucks. Nothing can travel faster than light. Multicellular life needs oxygen to live. Except we might need to rethink that last one.   Scientists have just discovered that a jellyfish-like parasite doesn’t have a mitochondrial genome – the

In 1999, radiologist Nicola Strickland went on a holiday to the Caribbean island of Tobago, a tropical paradise complete with idyllic, deserted beaches. On her first morning there, she went foraging for shells and corals in the white sand, but the holiday quickly took a turn for the worse.   Scattered amongst the coconuts and

Ancient canine craniums, discovered at a 28,500-year-old fossil site in Czechia, may represent one of the earliest stages of animal husbandry. Or, they could just be wolves. Today, all modern dogs (Canis familiaris) are descendants of Eurasian grey wolves (C. lupus), which were likely the first animals humans domesticated.   Over millennia, a gradual series

In the depths of a European cave, dwells what must be the laziest and most underwhelming of all creatures to have ever been called a dragon. With disturbingly fleshy-coloured skin, it has also earned the label of “human fish”.   But the olm (Proteus anguinus), with its cute stubby limbs, is actually an amphibian – a

A long, long time ago, the Indigenous Gunditjmara people – the traditional owners of lands in southwest Victoria, Australia – are said to have witnessed something truly remarkable.   An ancient oral tradition, passed down for countless generations, tells of how an ancestral creator-being transformed into the fiery volcano, Budj Bim. Almost 40,000 years later,