Biology

Feb 28th, 2026 - Understanding biodiversity within species is key to our understanding of why nature works the way it does, say researchers T welve miles from the heart of Rome, Dr Javier Ábalos pauses his walk, lifts his sunglasses and points. To his right, perched on a rocky wall, sits a beautiful lizard. Its body is coated in charcoal-black tones speckled with striking yellow across a green dorsum, and its head, with a prominent jaw, is splashed with fluorescent blue spots. The reptile basks in the ... [Read More]

Feb 28th, 2026 - It's quick and easy to access Live Science Plus, simply enter your email below. We'll send you a confirmation and sign you up for our daily newsletter, keeping you up to date with the latest science news. Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Join the conversation Add us as a preferred source on Google Get the Live Science Newsletter Get the world's most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and ... [Read More]

Feb 27th, 2026 - By More than 500 million years before humans walked the Earth, a catastrophic extinction event wiped out vast numbers of early animal species. Now, fossils pulled from a single quarry in southern China are revealing what life looked like in the aftermath — and the discovery is rewriting what scientists know about one of the earliest chapters in animal history. Scientists have identified 91 previously unknown species among more than 150 species discovered at a fossil site in Hunan ... [Read More]

Feb 27th, 2026 - Deep into the Panamanian night, the forest hums with sound. Chirping insects form a steady backdrop, rain softly trickles from leaves. Somewhere above a stream, frogs call into the darkness. But I am not there to see this scene. It's already passed. What I hold now is a small, mud-smeared biologger, no larger than a Lego brick. This tag recorded the sounds of the previous night. The evening before, my team and I had set nets outside the roosts – hollow trees or human-made structures such ... [Read More]

Feb 27th, 2026 - By Researchers working across five countries have described several remarkable new species, each with astonishing camouflage strategies so effective that even trained scientists struggle to spot them. Somewhere in the forests of Borneo, a spider sits perfectly still on a leaf, producing a foul smell and resting on a thin patch of white silk. To a passing fly, it looks and smells exactly like a fresh bird dropping. By the time the fly realizes otherwise, it's too late. That spider is one of ... [Read More]

Feb 27th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Deep inside Uganda's rainforest, scientists have found strong evidence that wild chimpanzees can really get a buzz from fruit. A team from UC Berkeley traveled to Uganda to Uganda to find out whether chimpanzees consume enough naturally fermented fruit to take in meaningful amounts of alcohol. The answer came from an unusual source: chimpanzee urine. Studying chimpanzees in Uganda Aleksey Maro, a graduate student at UC Berkeley, spent time in Kibale National Park in ... [Read More]

Feb 27th, 2026 - Scientists following humpback whales once brought to the brink of extinction in the South Pacific made a fascinating discovery: Older males were more likely to become fathers and younger males were less likely to do so. The new study, published Friday in the journal Current Biology, sheds light on the illuminating, sometimes counterintuitive dynamics of mating and how species survive. It also reveals how uncontrolled hunting can leave decades of damage, long after populations replenish, and ... [Read More]

Feb 26th, 2026 - NEW YORK (AP) — Humans and Neanderthals cozied up from time to time when they lived in the same areas tens of thousands of years ago . But we don't know much about who got with whom, or why. A new genetic analysis offers some ancient gossip: The pairings were more often female humans with male Neanderthals. How exactly this happened remains a huge question mark. Did human women venture into Neanderthal populations , or were the Neanderthal males drawn to larger human enclaves? Were these ... [Read More]

Feb 26th, 2026 - In Argentina's Patagonia region 95 million years ago, some huge dinosaurs roamed the landscape including fearsome meat-eater Giganotosaurus, at about eight tons, and immense long-necked plant-eater Argentinosaurus, perhaps 70 tons. But this was no mere land of the giants, as a newly described fossil shows. Researchers have found a well-preserved and nearly complete skeleton of one of the world's smallest-known dinosaurs, named Alnashetri cerropoliciensis. It was about the size of a crow and ... [Read More]

Feb 26th, 2026 - Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. . I t kind of looks like a Hershey's kiss," says Jenna Stacy-Dawes. She is talking about giraffe poop. The scat are surprisingly small for an animal that can grow to the height of two stacked basketball hoops in adulthood. The best samples are at the top of the pile, she tells the team of researchers assembled before her in a field camp in Kenya. That preserves the outermost layer, the part that rubs against the animal's intestines. Nautilus Members ... [Read More]

Feb 26th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google City lights do more than brighten the night – they may be quietly reshaping which species survive along our coasts. Along a heavily developed shoreline in Japan, researchers discovered that artificial light at night draws a surprisingly sharp biological line. On one side of the glow, one species dominates. Just beyond it, a nearly identical relative takes over. The two live in the same bay, crawl across the same seawalls, and endure the same tides – yet their ... [Read More]

Feb 25th, 2026 - By A team of scientists went looking for a minnow declared extinct. What they pulled from a South African river turned out to be something no one had ever documented — a small, colorful fish with a distinctively large head and bright orange-red spots near its fins. In 2017, researchers traveled to South Africa's Umzimkhulu River hoping to find surviving populations of the Maluti redfin minnow, a species that had been abundant in a nearby area during the early 1900s but was later declared ... [Read More]

Feb 25th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Scientists have recently observed a bearded vulture chick hatch in the wild in northern Spain after more than a century without successful breeding in that mountain range. That single hatchling restores the species to a landscape where it had vanished and tests whether decades of recovery work can now sustain a new generation. First hatch in a century On the cliffs of the Moncayo massif in northeastern Spain, a guarded nest finally produced a living vulture chick after ... [Read More]

Feb 25th, 2026 - WELLINGTON, New Zealand — The world's only flightless parrot species was once thought to be doomed by design. The kakapo is too heavy, too slow and, frankly, too delicious to survive around predators, and takes a shamelessly relaxed approach to reproduction. But the nocturnal and reclusive New Zealand native bird 's fate is teetering toward survival after an unlikely conservation effort that has coaxed the population from 50 to more than 200 over three decades. This year, with a bumper ... [Read More]

Feb 25th, 2026 - The alvarezsaurs were thought to have evolved a smaller stature because of their diet of ants and termites, but a new fossil found in Argentina casts doubt on that theory An almost-complete skeleton of a dinosaur that weighed less than a small chicken has provided new insights into the evolution of alvarezsaurs, which are among the smallest dinosaurs that ever lived. The 95-million-year-old fossil of Alnashetri cerropoliciensis was found at the La Buitrera site in northern Patagonia, Argentina, ... [Read More]

Feb 24th, 2026 - By They swim with paddle-like tails, climb trees using hooked claws and hunt on land. Nile monitor lizards, powerful carnivores that can grow longer than six feet, are spreading through South Florida, earning a reputation from wildlife officials as one of the most dangerous invasive reptiles in the state. Data show sightings have grown significantly in recent years, particularly in Southwest Florida, where entire neighborhoods in Cape Coral are now considered their established habitat. ... [Read More]