Deer are strongly associated with Eurasia and North America and less so with the other regions of the world. In this brief article - part of which is an excerpt from my 2013 article on the conservation status of South American mammals (Naish 2013) - I'm going to say a few things about the deer [...]..
Paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson's first glimpse of Lucy came on November 24, 1974
Some arachnids go to extraordinary lengths to mimic the appearance and behavior of ants
Forty years ago today, a young American paleoanthropologist named Donald Johanson made the discovery of a lifetime in the arid badlands of Ethiopia's remote Afar region: a 3.2-million-year-old skeleton of a small-brained creature that walked upright like we do...
You have to hike a pretty long distance if you hope to see the critically endangered bird known as the palila (Loxioides bailleui), but if you’re lucky and work hard, you can walk their entire habitat in a single day...
Importation of a frost-resistant barley from the Fertile Crescent to Tibet some 3,600 years ago is associated with the advent of settlements at 3,000 meters and more above sea level. Cynthia Graber reports
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Training rescue robots to land safely from falls like cats could give them nine lives in the field. Larry Greenemeier reports
Ants—they're everywhere. Charging across your picnic blanket, sneaking into your sandwich and, naturally, marching one by one (hurrah!
I came across these incredible videos by John J. King II (AleutianDream on YouTube) and I just had to share them. These snorkelers are in such close and peaceful contact with wild humpbacks and sperm whales in waters near the Dominican Republic, and Dominica respectively...
Ant-mimicking spiders are the ultimate imposters
New research not only shows the predictive power of symmetry for athletic achievement but is a marker for overall genetic advantage
Scientists will examine the mammoth to learn whether it will yield enough undamaged DNA to make cloning the extinct creature a reality
One of the most spectacular and visually fascinating Tet Zoo-related books of recent-ish months is Chet Van Duzer's Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps, published in 2013 by the British Library...
A nebulous trade in forged and illegal fossils is an ever-growing headache for paleontologists
This last month has been extremely stressful for all of us at Sikundur research station in North Sumatra while we've been following two of our favorite orangutans, Suci and her 3-year-old infant Siboy...
Scientific American health and medicine correspondent Dina Fine Maron talks with Armand Sprecher of Doctors Without Borders, who has fought Ebola in Guinea and Liberia. And Steve talks Ebola with Stanford's David Relman, chair of the Forum on Microbial Threats of the Institute of Medicine
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For predation, defense or dominance, evolution has weaponized bodily features on many species to give them the upper horn, tusk, tooth or pincer in the fight for survival
The island of Madagascar is home to a pretty amazing and diverse collection of geckos, with nearly 70 species from 10 different genera. Now you can add one more species to the list: Paroedura hordiesi, a highly camouflaged nocturnal gecko that was recently discovered in northern Madagascar...
As the European Space Agency’s Philae lander bounced and settled onto the surface of comet 67P/C-G’s crumbly nucleus it wasn’t just space exploration, it was time travel...
Regular readers will know that I have a major interest in ichthyosaurs, the so-called fish-lizards of the Mesozoic (see links below). As you'll know if you keep your finger on the pulse of Mesozoic reptile news, last week saw the publication of a really interesting new animal from the Lower Triassic: the Chinese `proto-ichthyosaur' Cartorhynchus [...]..
