Though plankton drift with the ocean currents, that doesn’t mean they’re incapable of any movement. Many of them can move to find food or mates, and they do so in some surprising and sometimes entertaining ways...
BERLIN: The former oil shale mining site of Messel, near Frankfurt, Germany, is well known for its spectacular fossils of organisms that lived between 47 million and 48 million years ago, during the Eocene epoch...
Chimps choose an overnight camp site based on the likelihood of finding calorically rich food nearby. Karen Hopkin reports
“To honor a fallen peer and adjust to life outside the war zones, four men linked by combat journey by foot from Washington, D.C., to Pennsylvania.” That is how HBO describes Sebastian Junger’s new documentary, The Last Patrol, which HBO is airing Monday night...
Scientists recently confirmed what anglers have known for centuries—there's something special about a big mama fish. The bigger the fish, the better the bragging rights—and often, the bigger paycheck or prize...
Mexican free-tailed bats make calls that interfere with fellow bats’ echolocation, causing them to miss their insect targets. Christopher Intagliata reports...
How should you treat your ducks? The answer is mired in duckling politics
Something ghostly and hungry flies the skies of northern Australia. Its massive white wings stand out against the darkness as it circles, searching for prey.
The ability to engage in extended hibernation might be what saved ancestral mammals from extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period. Karen Hopkin reports
It defies belief, but a 180 million year old fern fossil unearthed in Sweden is so exquisitely preserved that it is possible to see its cells dividing.
We know that octopuses have awesome visual systems and super-sensitive suckers. We have even learned that they can hear. But little scientific attention has been paid to their sense of smell...
Is complex life rare in the cosmos? The idea that it could be rests on the observation that the existence of life like us – with large, energy hungry, complicated cells – may be contingent on a number of very specific and unlikely factors in the history of the Earth...
In October 2004 paleontologists announced a new human species called Homo floresiensis . Ever since then debate has raged on whether it truly is a new species or merely a diseased Homo sapiens...
An analysis of the oldest known DNA from a human reveals a mysterious group that roamed northern Asia
Hey, Darren, how's it going with that plan to discuss all the fossil crocodylomorph groups? Huh? Well, ha ha, it ain't going so well… goddam life getting in the way of my blogging...
Topping out at about 20 kilograms, a coyote has to be able to hunt both smaller and bigger prey, and avoid being prey itself, a combination that selects for intelligence. Steve Mirsky reports
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Evidence of bony organs in ancient fish suggests that they copulated, although many of their descendants stopped doing so
The arguments over an ancient skeleton just won’t die
The movement of lizards around the Caribbean is forcing an accounting for human activity in even the most basic ecological models
One of the most astounding events of my life was immediately preceded by one of the scariest: I turned out my dive light in the ocean at night.
