Biology

Feb 7th, 2026 - What were the first animals? The fierce sponge–jelly battle that just won't end Which animals came first? For more than a century, most evidence suggested that sponges, immobile filter-feeders that lack muscles, neurons and other specialized tissues, were the first animal lineages to emerge. Then, in 2008, a genomic study pointed to a head-scratching rival: dazzling, translucent predators called comb jellies, or ctenophores, with nerves, muscles and other sophisticated features. That ... [Read More]

Feb 7th, 2026 - Special pods at Chester zoo helped conservationists breed and release more than 100,000 greater Bermuda snails A button-sized snail once feared extinct in its Bermudian home is thriving again after conservationists bred and released more than 100,000 of the molluscs. The greater Bermuda snail ( Poecilozonites bermudensis ) was found in the fossil record but believed to have vanished from the North Atlantic archipelago , until a remnant population was discovered in a damp and overgrown alleyway ... [Read More]

Feb 6th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google A newly described fossil fish species, Romundina gagnieri , has revealed teeth growing on bony plates that line the roof of its mouth. This extends the acquisition of teeth in jawed fishes to a far earlier stage in vertebrate evolution. That architecture reframes how jaws and teeth first emerged together in fishes, shifting the starting point for a defining feature of vertebrate life. Clues inside a jawed fish skull Those tooth -bearing plates appear on fragments of an ... [Read More]

Feb 6th, 2026 - Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. . T here are monsters lurking in the rivers of southern Japan—giant salamanders that can grow up to five feet long. Second only to their Chinese cousins, these wet-skinned leviathans are some of the largest amphibians in the world. New research into their diet published in Oikos reveals they have a monstrous appetite to match, and one that changes dramatically over their lifetimes.   Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. To ... [Read More]

Feb 6th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google A plant-eating dinosaur once thought to be a juvenile has now been confirmed as a fully grown adult, revealing a new tiny-bodied species called Foskeia pelendonum. The discovery reshapes how small dinosaurs fit into evolution, clarifying relationships across a crowded branch of the dinosaur family tree. Fossils uncovered in northern Spain preserve several skeletons of the same small-bodied herbivore, including at least one individual that had already reached maturity. By ... [Read More]

Feb 6th, 2026 - Spotted lanternflies are thriving in the US, and scientists may know the reason. They speculate that the secret to spotted lanternflies' sustenance may lie in the tricks they picked up in their native country, as published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B . These creatures were first documented in the US back in 2014. Since then, they have expanded to 19 states in the eastern US. The spotted lanternfly (Lycorma delicatula) is a planthopper with long mouthparts that help it to ... [Read More]

Feb 6th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google If you want to study a beaked whale, good luck doing it the normal way. These animals are basically professionals at staying out of sight. They spend most of their lives at extreme depths, come up for air briefly, and then vanish again.  Instead of trying to spot them, scientists in the Gulf of Mexico did something much smarter: they listened. A team of researchers used underwater recordings to rebuild a 3D picture of how beaked whales dive and hunt – without ... [Read More]

Feb 5th, 2026 - Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. . I nvasive species present an interesting paradox for geneticists. Because their founding populations tend to be small, they have less genetic diversity, which means they have a limited evolutionary toolkit to adapt to their new home. And yet, many of them seem to thrive.  Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. So what gives?  New research into spotted lanternflies, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological ... [Read More]

Feb 5th, 2026 - Reading time 5 minutes At first glance, the photo above may look like a grove of alien-esque trees as seen from below. But this picture wasn't taken on some otherworldly planet—it's actually an extreme close-up of the inside of a cauliflower soft coral living in the Lembeh Strait, Indonesia. The mind-bending image just won Australian photographer Ross Gudgeon the grand prize in the Close-Up Photographer of the Year competition. This annual contest is dedicated to revealing the hidden ... [Read More]

Feb 5th, 2026 - A team of experts has specified certain ocean areas that should be protected to increase shark and ray populations . They identified 816 areas and described them in a report published by the IUCN . The report, titled "Ocean Travellers," calls them "Important Shark and Ray Areas" (ISRAs). All of these areas host key activities for at least one threatened shark or ray species. This finding is crucial, as shark and ray populations have been struggling worldwide due to exploitative activities, such ... [Read More]

Feb 5th, 2026 - Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. . I f you've ever had the misfortune of staring down the gullet of a screaming goose, you know it contains the stuff of nightmares—a thick, barbed tongue surrounded by an array of fleshy, toothlike protrusions. Now, research published in The Innovation about a recently uncovered Archaeopteryx fossil shows that birds got their fascinating structures early in their evolution.  Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. The Archaeopteryx ... [Read More]

Feb 4th, 2026 - A groundbreaking new study using artificial intelligence (AI) has revealed that the asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago caused only a modest decline in shark and ray species. The findings contradict previous theories of how severely the event affected life in the oceans. Led by Swansea University, researchers combined AI models with the most complete fossil dataset of sharks and rays. Using these tools, the team was able to map the number of species of sharks and ... [Read More]

Feb 4th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Australia once had kangaroos far larger than any living species. Fossils reveal animals weighing more than 440 pounds, with some reaching almost 550 pounds. Such size raises an obvious question. Could an animal that heavy move by hopping, or did size force a different way of moving? For many years, scientists believed hopping had a strict weight limit. New research now challenges that idea using bone mechanics, muscle forces, and fossil evidence . Animal size shapes ... [Read More]

Feb 4th, 2026 - A juvenile sloth snoozes dreamily while tucked in the embrace of its mother, sheltered from pouring rain. A pod of spinner dolphins chases lanternfish. A crab hitches a ride on top of a glowing jellyfish in the dark, frigid waters of a night sea. A lion-tailed macaque races on a leaf-strewn charcoal road in India, gazing with its fierce, sapphire eyes dripping with curiosity. Each photograph tells a story that is as emotional as it is dramatic. While each of the 60,000 photographs submitted for ... [Read More]

Feb 2nd, 2026 - Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. . T he closest thing we have to a real-life Jurassic Park is the Morrison Formation, a sprawling deposit of fossil-rich sedimentary rock dating back to the Jurassic Period spanning several Southwestern states. While the dinosaurs unearthed there have captivated paleontologists for over a century, they're only now starting to get a fuller picture of the ecosystem they thrived in. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Paleontologists led by ... [Read More]

Feb 2nd, 2026 - We are getting a clearer sense of where and how often Homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred, and it turns out the behaviour was much more common than we first thought Homo sapiens and Neanderthals were probably interbreeding over a huge area stretching from western Europe into Asia. We have long known that early humans ( Homo sapiens ) and Neanderthals ( Homo neanderthalensis ) interbred , which is why most non-African people today have some Neanderthal DNA, typically about 2 per cent of ... [Read More]