Biology

Dec 21st, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google A new fossil fish suggests that the largest group of freshwater fish began in the sea, not in rivers. These fish include more than 10,000 species, from river giants to tiny aquarium favorites. The key fossil is a tiny skeleton that was unearthed in ancient river deposits in Alberta, Canada. An international team used its tiny ear bones to redraw a major chapter of fish evolution. Freshwater fish origins The work was led by Juan Liu, a paleontologist at the University of ... [Read More]

Dec 21st, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google About 20,000 years ago, a cave on a Caribbean island quietly filled with bones. Owls hunted by night, returned to their rocky shelter, and regurgitated pellets packed with the remains of rodents, birds, and other prey. Over generations, those bones piled up, layer by layer, sealed by time and rain. Long after the owls disappeared, another tenant arrived. Bees began using the ancient jaws as nurseries, laying eggs inside empty tooth sockets and sealing them with mud and ... [Read More]

Dec 20th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google A small tyrant dinosaur once written off as a teenaged T. rex has now been confirmed as its own species. That animal, called Nanotyrannus , turns out to represent not just one form but two closely related species. Using an almost complete skeleton from Montana rocks about 67 million years old, scientists have rewritten the growth story for Tyrannosaurus rex .  Their work shows that this creature did not grow up into a giant, which means earlier ideas about T. ... [Read More]

Dec 20th, 2025 - The Campbell's keeled glass-snail is officially extinct, but researchers have 'high hopes' that translocation will allow the population to thrive O n a grey day in early June, a commercial plane landed at Norfolk Island Airport in the South Pacific. Onboard was precious cargo ferried some 1,700km from Sydney: four blue plastic crates with "LIVE ANIMALS" signs affixed to the outside. Inside were thumbnail-sized snails, hundreds of them, with delicate, keeled shells. The molluscs' arrival was the ... [Read More]

Dec 20th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Two dinosaur eggs, each about five inches (13 centimeters) across and almost perfectly round, have surprised scientists in eastern China. Instead of fragile shells packed with embryonic bone, the fossil eggs were hollow cavities stuffed with glittering mineral crystals. The work was led by Qing He, a paleontologist at Anhui University and the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology , Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her area of research focus is fossilized eggs. Her ... [Read More]

Dec 19th, 2025 - By Christina Larson , Nicky Forster , Hyojin Yoo , Peter Hamlin and Caleb Diehl Published Dec. 19, 2025 Every animal with a brain needs sleep — and even a few without a brain do, too. Humans sleep , birds sleep, whales sleep and even jellyfish sleep. Sleep is universal "even though it's actually very risky," said Paul-Antoine Libourel, a researcher at the Neuroscience Research Center of Lyon in France. When animals nod off, they're most vulnerable to sneaky predators. But despite the ... [Read More]

Dec 19th, 2025 - Scientists are flying drones through whale breath to monitor ocean health. Humpback whales are mammals, which means they have to surface to breathe a few times an hour. When they do, they exhale a thunderous, explosive cloud of mist. Decades ago, marine biologists hoping to study the health of these giants had to rely on crude, invasive methods, or worse — wait for the animal to wash up dead on a beach. Now, they can just fly a drone through the cloud. This innovative technique, ... [Read More]

Dec 19th, 2025 - Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. . C ommercial ocean fishing has come a long way, from historic hand gathering by coastal communities to fleets of enormous ships that now trawl the oceans. Thousands of miles of fishing nets and long lines bristling with hooks deployed daily capture billions of pounds of seafood. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. But their efficiency comes at a cost—the bycatch of nontarget species—because fishing gear is largely ... [Read More]

Dec 19th, 2025 - Insects and the plants they depend on are migrating in response to climate change, but not always in the same way. Butterflies are often considered bellwether species for climate change, and to retain the cooler climates they need for their life cycles, species around the world have been shifting their habitats and migratory patterns to higher latitudes and higher elevations. But are the plants that butterflies depend on shifting their habitats in step? New research has found that out of 24 ... [Read More]

Dec 18th, 2025 - Imagine a healthy forest, home to a variety of species: Birds are flitting between tree branches, salamanders are sliding through leaf litter, and wolves are tracking the scent of deer through the understory. Each of these animals has a role in the forest , and most ecologists would argue that losing any one of these species would be bad for the ecosystem as a whole. Unfortunately – whether due to habitat loss , overhunting or introduced species – humans have made some species ... [Read More]

Dec 18th, 2025 - Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. . A lone in a canoe, Val Plumwood was gliding along a channel in tropical Australia's Kakadu National Park in 1985 when a huge crocodile rammed her. She paddled to the shore as fast as she could, but the crocodile struck the canoe again and again. A thought flashed through Plumwood's mind: "I am prey." She grabbed hold of an overhanging tree, hoping to escape onto land. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. "Before my foot even tripped the ... [Read More]

Dec 18th, 2025 - A tiny amphibian highlights how much biodiversity still hides in Brazil's mountains. In the mountains of southern Brazil, a frog just over a centimeter long lives in the leaf litter of the forest floor. It is bright orange, active during the day, and easy to overlook. Until recently, it had no name. Now scientists have formally described it as a new species: Brachycephalus lulai , a pumpkin toadlet found only in a small stretch of cloud forest in the Serra do Quiriri, in Santa Catarina. The ... [Read More]

Dec 17th, 2025 - Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. . O striches, kiwi birds, and penguins are among the tiny sample of birds that can't lift their wings (or flippers) and fly. Now, scientists have identified a feathered dinosaur that also seems to have lacked this skill. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. This creature belongs to a lineage of feathered dinos called pennaraptorans, who came onto the scene around 160 million years ago. They're distant ancestors of today's birds, and the ... [Read More]

Dec 17th, 2025 - The idea began in California's Sierra Nevada, a towering spine of rock and ice where rising temperatures and the decline of snowpack are transforming ecosystems, sometimes with catastrophic consequences for wildlife. The prairie-doglike Belding's ground squirrel ( Urocitellus beldingi ) had been struggling there as the mountain meadows it relies on dry out in years with less snowmelt and more unpredictable weather. At lower elevations, the foothill yellow-legged frog ( Rana boylii ) was also ... [Read More]

Dec 16th, 2025 - New research suggests the famous Little Foot fossil may belong to a previously unknown hominin species. When paleoanthropologists finally freed the skeleton called Little Foot from its stone prison in South Africa, they believed they were meeting an old acquaintance. Instead, they may have uncovered a stranger. After decades of excavation and debate, a new analysis argues that Little Foot — one of the most complete hominin fossils ever found — does not belong to any known species. ... [Read More]

Dec 16th, 2025 - Hundreds of yards of dinosaur tracks with toes and claws have been found in the Italian Alps in a region that will host the 2026 Winter Olympics, authorities said Tuesday. "This set of dinosaur footprints is one of the largest collections in all of Europe, in the whole world," Attilio Fontana, head of the Lombardy region in northern Italy, said during a news conference. The tracks, which are over 200 million years old, were discovered in the Stelvio National Park, in an area between the towns ... [Read More]