Trilobites

Scientists found an unexpected aging pattern in a mostly intact juvenile mammal skeleton from the paleontological period.

By Jack Tamisiea

An examination of an aquatic, shrimplike creature that lived half a billion years ago offers insight into how arthropods with mandibles became so common.

By Rebecca Dzombak

While the volcano’s eruption was deadly, research shows that many people in the ancient Roman city died in building collapses from the earthquake associated with the outburst.

By Jordan Pearson

Asian honeybees protect their hives by making insect intruders go airborne.

By Elizabeth Anne Brown

It’s not easy being green, golden and male, according to a researcher’s observation of attempted frog cannibalism in Australia.

By Joshua Rapp Learn

Discovering evidence of deadly deluges of snow from the past could help protect people on mountains around the world, researchers say.

By Katherine Kornei

More than 100 million years ago, scientists say, warming seas and reduced oxygen may have sent some sharks higher into the water column, where they evolved to be fierce and hungry.

By Jeanne Timmons

Scientists used techniques from the field of gravitational wave astronomy to argue that the Antikythera mechanism contained a lunar calendar.

By Becky Ferreira

An ancient aquatic predator resembling a giant salamander turned up in an African fossil deposit, suggesting unwritten chapters of how animals moved onto land.

By Asher Elbein

The insects seem to know which injuries to treat as they engage in a behavior that seems almost human.

By Annie Roth

A fossil bed in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco is allowing new insights into the anatomies of arthropods that lived a half-billion years ago.

By Jack Tamisiea

A fatal fungal disease has devastated the world’s amphibians. But the fungus has a vulnerability: It cannot tolerate heat.

By Emily Anthes

Researchers discovered painted ladies on a South American beach and then built a case that they started their journey in Europe or Africa.

By Monique Brouillette

There has long been anecdotal evidence of the wormy creatures taking to the air, but videos recorded in Madagascar at last prove the animals’ acrobatics.

By Veronique Greenwood

Researchers analyzed a skull found in Montana of a plant-eating member of the ceratops family, finding distinct traits.

By Asher Elbein

Researchers say the nearly mile-long swim was the longest by big cats ever recorded.

By Anthony Ham

Computer simulations suggest that a collision with another planetary object early in Earth’s history may have provided the heat to set off plate tectonics.

By Lucas Joel

An analysis of elephant calls using an artificial intelligence tool suggests that the animals may use and respond to individualized rumbles.

By Kate Golembiewski

They build extensive burrow networks and don’t seem to mind when other woodland creatures use them as flameproof bunkers.

By Darren Incorvaia

During a chaotic period some 50 million years ago, the strange deep-sea creatures left the ocean bottom and thrived by clamping onto their mates.

By William J. Broad

Cuts in the cranium, which is more than 4,000 years old, hint that people in the ancient civilization attempted to treat a scourge that persists today.

By Jordan Pearson

A genetic analysis of the German cockroach explained its rise in southern Asia millenniums ago, and how it eventually turned up in your kitchen.

By Sofia Quaglia

Videos filmed by divers show that choking, blinding and sacrificing limbs are all in the cephalopods’ repertoire.

By Joshua Rapp Learn

If spiders use their webs like a large external eardrum, researchers reasoned, perhaps spider silk could be the basis for a powerful listening device.

By Jordan Pearson

New research shows the “upside-down trees” originated in Madagascar and then caught a ride on ocean currents to reach mainland Africa and Australia.

By Rachel Nuwer

The brittle star specimen suggests that the sea creatures have been splitting themselves in two to reproduce for more than 150 million years.

By Jack Tamisiea

By sequencing an enormous amount of data, a group of hundreds of researchers has gained new insights into how flowers evolved on Earth.

By Veronique Greenwood

Divers and marine biologists are getting a window into the lives of a red crustacean most often found in the guts of other species.

By Jules Jacobs

A science video maker in China couldn’t find a good explanation for why hot and cold water sound different, so he did his own research and published it.

By Sam Kean

Dice snakes found on an island in southeastern Europe fully commit themselves to the role of ex-reptile.

By Asher Elbein

For the first time, scientists observed a primate in the wild treating a wound with a plant that has medicinal properties.

By Douglas Main

The scene ends badly, as you might imagine.

By Lesley Evans Ogden

Indigenous rangers in Australia’s Western Desert got a rare close-up with the northern marsupial mole, which is tiny, light-colored and blind, and almost never comes to the surface.

By Anthony Ham

A series of foot tracks in southeastern China points to the discovery of a giant velociraptor relative, paleontologists suggest in a new study.

By Jack Tamisiea

A new study resets the timing for the emergence of bioluminescence back to millions of years earlier than previously thought.

By Sam Jones

Over time researchers have found fewer of the insects turning up in light traps, suggesting they may be less attracted to some kinds of light than they once were.

By Veronique Greenwood

Ancient humans left behind numerous archaeological traces in the cavern, and scientists say there may be thousands more like it on the Arabian Peninsula to study.

By Robin George Andrews

When Ruby Reynolds and her father found a fossil on an English beach, they didn’t know it belonged to an 82-foot ichthyosaur that swam during the days of the dinosaurs.

By Kate Golembiewski

An ascending jet’s contrail over Montreal added to the wonder of last Monday’s eclipse.

By Chloe Rose Stuart-Ulin

Extinct foxes and other animals were an important part of early South American communities, a new study has found.

By Jack Tamisiea

The study could help identify wood from Russia, which has been banned by many countries because of the war.

By Alexander Nazaryan

These reptiles and their social networks are understudied, according to researchers applying scents to different snakes to assess their behavior.

By Asher Elbein

A nearly 2,000-year-old stash pouch provides the first evidence of the intentional use of a powerful psychedelic plant in Western Europe during the Roman Era.

By Rachel Nuwer

How do you design an app for a parrot? Consider games that are “made to be licked,” a new study suggests.

By Emily Anthes

The observation suggests that seals join cobras, archerfish and other animals known to spit, although researchers can only speculate about the reason for the mammal’s expectoration.

By Douglas Main

Scientists never imagined that the blind cave salamanders called olms willingly left their caves. But at numerous aboveground springs, there they were.

By Elizabeth Anne Brown

A new study reveals that cicadas can discharge urine with far more force than their size would suggest. This spring’s output could be significant.

By Alla Katsnelson

While the sentinel trees of Northern Lebanon may not be as old as some traditions hold, one tree might be more than 1,000 years old.

By Katherine Kornei

Amphibians called caecilians add cloacal secretions of a nutritious material similar to milk to their numerous quirks, according to a new study.

By Sofia Quaglia

A green honeycreeper spotted on a farm in Colombia exhibits a rare biological phenomenon known as bilateral gynandromorphism.

By Emily Anthes

The arachnids, which are not spiders, were thought to have only two eyes, compared with many more on spiders.

By Veronique Greenwood

A new study argues that Perucetus, an ancient whale species, was certainly big, but not as big as today’s blue whales.

By Carl Zimmer

A study suggests that humans often misinterpret a pet’s signals; even purring doesn’t guarantee a contented cat.

By Anthony Ham

In the Panamanian rainforest, scientists found the first known plant species to transform decaying tissue into a new source of nutrients.

By Douglas Main

Freezing water with salt or other impurities yields ice that is easier to loosen from a surface, according to a new study.

By Katrina Miller

Unusual experiments on organs recovered from three carcasses suggest how baleen whales call out at sea.

By Kate Golembiewski

Three studies have recently explored toe-tapping, which seems to have something to do with frogs preying on insects.

By Elizabeth Landau

About 8,200 years ago, in one of the last places settled by humans, prehistoric peoples began painting comblike designs as the climate shifted.

By Becky Ferreira

Maybe frog and fungi are friends.

By Jude Coleman

A team of scientists thinks the planet may have been thrust into its longest ice age because less gas leaked out of volcanoes.

By Katrina Miller

In an unlikely act of altruism observed two years ago, a male elephant seal prevented a younger animal from drowning.

By Darren Incorvaia

Scientists discovered a species off the Alabama coast that is part of group of mussels never before seen at such shallow depths.

By Veronique Greenwood

The toilet brushlike specimen from a Canadian quarry hints at the evolutionary experiments that occurred during a 15-million-year gap in the fossil record.

By Robin Catalano

What paleontologists long believed were long spines on the aptly named Alienacanthus turn out to be an extended lower jaw.

By Jack Tamisiea

A study offers the latest evidence of the problem-solving prowess of the clever birds.

By Carolyn Wilke

Scientists built a working model of an early winged dinosaur to test a hypothesis about how the appendages evolved.

By Asher Elbein

Scientists find that male antechinuses, rodent-like animals from Australia, will forgo sleep for sex during their breeding season, after which they die.

By Miriam Fauzia

Scientists studied how thresher sharks use “extreme yoga” to whip their tails at prey.

By Kate Golembiewski

Researchers completed genomic research on carcasses of the largest animals that have ever lived to understand North Atlantic whale populations.

By Darren Incorvaia

Researchers found that the slime eel, or hagfish, known for deluging predators with mucus, tripled the size of its genome hundreds of millions of years ago.

By Veronique Greenwood

Researchers say the species they named Tyrannosaurus mcraeensis predated the dinosaur era’s great predator.

By Asher Elbein

The specimen came from a 289 million-year-old fossil deposit and might offer clues to how skin evolved.

By Kate Golembiewski

Fossil teeth reveal Gigantopithecus was doomed by a changing environment and an inflexible diet.

By Jack Tamisiea

Scientists recently analyzed a Peruvian 10-cent piece with an unexplained origin.

By Katherine Kornei

New research is trying to remake the case that fossils known as Nanotyrannus were their own species, rather than a teenage Tyrannosaurus rex.

By Asher Elbein

Fossils collected more than 150 years ago show that the techniques some creatures use for defensive curling have not changed in millions of years.

By Jack Tamisiea

Goffin’s cockatoos, long known as adept tool users, are the first parrots found to alter their food by dipping it in water.

By Emily Anthes

Scientists captured new imagery of atmospheric phenomena that occur during some lightning storms, offering clues into how they form.

By Robin George Andrews

A 75-million-year-old Gorgosaurus fossil is the first tyrannosaur skeleton ever found with a filled stomach.

By Michael Greshko

With machine learning, scientists are trying to chemically define the murky concept of terroir. The models might be useful for detecting wine fraud.

By Virginia Hughes

The preserved insects, from a cache of Lebanese resin, appear to be male but have mouth parts that are found only on modern female mosquitoes.

By Kate Golembiewski

Scientists found that dolphins have an ability to sense electric fields, which may help them hunt and navigate the seas.

By Carolyn Wilke

Tiny crustaceans the size of sand grains sneeze up packets of glowing mucus to impress potential partners.

By Elizabeth Anne Brown

Deep-sea videos from around the world show how the whipnose anglerfish prefers to swim belly up.

By Elizabeth Anne Brown

This study has everything: jumping spiders; insects donning striped and solid patterns; and evolutionary lessons about predators and prey.

By Jack Tamisiea

Shipboard experiments suggested that sediment from the exploitation of metals in the ocean could be harmful to marine life.

By Kate Golembiewski

The success of wild striated caracaras in a test suggests that the intellects of more bird species may be underestimated.

By Darren Incorvaia

Bats have long been known for unusual forms of sexual reproduction, and a new study adds another surprise to the behaviors of the winged mammals.

By Annie Roth

An analysis of nine species of tyrannosaurs documented the evolutionary forces that led to the dinosaur’s reign.

By Jeanne Timmons

In the Cyclops Mountains in the Indonesian part of the island of New Guinea, Oxford scientists and local guides made a series of spectacular discoveries.

By Douglas Main

Researchers showed that cells in your hair follicles release important chemical messengers in response to gentle touches to your skin.

By Veronique Greenwood

This is what happens when an apex predator collides with an ecosystem engineer.

By Cara Giaimo

The chance finding in a Japanese university’s greenhouse could help researchers find ways to control agricultural pests or even insects that spread disease.

By Elizabeth Anne Brown

A simulation suggests that fine particles played a stronger role in cooling the planet and stalling photosynthesis after an asteroid impacted the Earth.

By Miriam Fauzia

Jewel wasps carve up cockroaches like jack-o’-lanterns in a way scientists have never seen before.

By Jason Bittel

In one of Yellowstone National Park’s most well-known attractions, researchers discovered an extraordinary diversity of microbial life.

By Sarah Derouin

A modified version of the classic mirror test suggested that roosters recognize their reflections.

By Darren Incorvaia

Fluorescent anatomy, which recently seemed to be a quirk in unusual animals such as platypuses and opossums, was found in most living families of mammals.

By Cara Giaimo

With a ghostly finger in a lab, researchers coaxed people to hear phantom voices.

By Veronique Greenwood

Caecilians are the first amphibians known to pass on their microbiomes to their offspring.

By Sofia Quaglia