Apes . . . well, ape. Two gorillas at Virunga National Park in Congo have taken the Internet by storm by posing – on two feet – in a photograph with park rangers. The rangers posted a selfie on Facebook late last week showing two orphaned female gorillas, Ndakazi and Ndeze, standing tall beside them in the Senkwekwe Center

California is notorious for its earthquakes, but a stunning new discovery reveals for the first time just how much we’ve underestimated its omnipresent earth-shaking potential.   By the time you just about finish reading this story, in fact, Southern California will probably have experienced another quake – based off a new, unprecedented deep dive into

Slime mould might easily be one of the strangest life forms on our planet. They are neither plants, animals, nor fungi, but various species of complex, single-celled amoebas of the protist kingdom. Sometimes they form colonies able to grow, move, and even exhibit a strange kind of intelligence.   Even without a nervous system, they

Have you ever seen a giant red jellyfish light up the night sky for a split second? If you have, you’re not imagining things. You’ve just witnessed a lightning-like electrical discharge high in the atmosphere known as a sprite.   Paul Smith captured the elusive phenomenon Wednesday night as storms raged over northwest Oklahoma and

In the Hollywood blockbuster The Core, the planet’s core suddenly stops rotating, causing Earth’s magnetic field to collapse. Then bursts of deadly microwaves cook the Colosseum and melt the Golden Gate Bridge.   While “nearly everything in the movie is wrong,” according to Justin Revenaugh, a seismologist from the University of Minnesota, it is true

So you’ve discovered an unusual winged insect preserved in amber, and it happens to have a superb set of mouth parts dangling from its head.  You could name it after a president’s body part, maybe. If not David Attenborough. Again. Or just do what one researcher did with a specimen that doesn’t seem to fit

A beautiful spring morning at the Topeka Zoo in Kansas turned tragic Saturday when a male Sumatran tiger attacked a keeper, inflicting wounds that sent her to a hospital. Although keepers are never supposed to be in the same space as the tigers, they found themselves together in the outdoor habitat that morning for reasons

Butterflies are like the Bear Grylls of the Amazon rainforest. Faced with a nutrient-poor environment, these beautiful creatures will drink just about anything to survive. That goes for muddy river banks, sweaty clothing, puddles of urine, and of course, the ‘tears’ of turtles.   It’s hard to believe until you see it with your own

There’s something about the meandering streak of lightning that implies random chaos. Yet bolts from the blue not only hit the same places with regularity, but successive discharges often reuse the exact same channel.   It’s never been entirely clear how the path laid down by one bolt sticks around for repeat performances, but new

Just when you think orcas couldn’t possible be any more awesome, they get even better. New evidence shows these whales are really good at scaring off the most feared beast in the sea. Yep. Orcas have toppled the great white shark off their ‘apex predator’ throne.   A team of marine scientists has found that

Proof that families come in all shapes, sizes and species, three eagles – two dads and a mom – are raising three, fluffy-feathered eaglets in a nest near the Mississippi River this spring.   According to the Stewards of the Upper Mississippi River Refuge, all three birds, Valor I, Valor II (dads) and Starr (mom),

A Florida man was killed on Friday by what ornithologists say is the “world’s most dangerous bird“. It was a cassowary – an enormous, flightless bird around which even experienced zookeepers take precautions.   He raised the animal on his farm, along with other exotic birds, authorities said. Police identified the man as 75-year-old Marvin

Over the years, researchers have learned a lot about dinosaur anatomy, but there’s one feature that keeps eluding us.  Of all the dinosaur tracks discovered, only a rare few, far less than one percent, show any traces of skin.   It’s a serious blindspot, especially when the patterns that this organ makes are like fingerprints,

In the sandy seabeds of temperate climates, a curious flatworm thrives. It’s called Paracatenula, and it has neither mouth, butt, nor gut. These shortcomings don’t slow the worm down, though – a symbiotic relationship with bacteria that live inside it keeps it alive. It works so well, in fact, they’ve been doing it for over

We’ve still got so much of the undersea world to explore, not least the Mariana Trench – the deepest natural trench in the ocean – which goes down 10,994 metres (36,070 feet) in places. Now another fantastic find from this subaqueous abyss has just been revealed.   The most comprehensive microbial analysis of the trench

Although the image above might make you think it’s had an Instagram filter added, what you’re looking at is pollen – lots and lots of pollen. The images were taken by photographer Jeremy Gilchrist on Monday in Durham, North Carolina and honestly, if you’re feeling a little sneezy just looking at it, you’re not alone.

Sixty-five million years ago, planet Earth was pummelled by a wave of extinction that left few marine organisms alive. Now scientists are trying to coax what’s left out of the abyss and into the limelight, baiting some ancient creatures with a rare delicacy of the past.   A gross, yet fascinating new video shows a

Archaeologists just pried another secret of our past from the clutches of the earth, welcoming a new human species to our growing family tree. This discovery began with an ancient foot, or what was left of one. A foot bone, called the third metatarsal, was found in the Callao Cave on the Philippine island of

For 430 million years, nestled in some rocks in England, Cthulhu waited, dreaming. Now it’s finally seen the light of day, and it’s honestly a lot smaller than we were expecting.   This fossilised Cthulhu is related to sea cucumbers, and dates back to the Silurian period, when the first bony fish appeared. Its three-centimetre

It wasn’t ash that killed the victims of volcano Vesuvius in Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 CE. It wasn’t lava. It was something called pyroclastic flows – extremely hot clouds of volcanic gas and debris that can move at insane speeds.   Pyroclastic flow speeds are so intense, they seem to defy the laws of

Cats have a reputation for being aloof, and that reputation is only going to get stronger after scientific results from Japan revealed the true extent to which they have been ignoring us all this time.   While dog owners have to do very little to get the eager-to-please attention of their good boys and girls,

Researchers last week captured and killed the largest Burmese python to be removed from Big Cypress National Preserve in the Florida Everglades, according to wildlife officials.   The 17-foot (5.1-meter), 140-pound (63.5-kilogram) female snake – an invasive species devastating to native wildlife – was discovered using a new tracking approach that leans on technology and

Five suspected poachers entered Kruger National Park in South Africa last week to kill rhinos living there, according to authorities. Only four of the men left alive. The fifth was killed by an elephant and later “devoured” by a pride of lions, park officials said in a statement.   “Entering Kruger National Park illegally and

You might not think about it much, but water is super weird. It doesn’t behave like any other liquid. And scientists think they have figured out why – and it has to do with the strange arrangement of its molecules.   One of the weirdest aspects of water is its unusual density. Normally, liquids become

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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,

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

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

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

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

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),

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

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

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