Biology

Oct 14th, 2025 - Several wildlife species across the world are now moving toward endangerment or extinction as their habitats are slowly beginning to disappear due to various reasons. Some of the most common causes of this are increasing pollution levels , deforestation, and human expansion. From tiny insects to large mammals and even marine animals, the danger of being endangered is accelerating. Recently, the wild honeybees, Apis mellifera, found in Europe have been officially declared endangered ... [Read More]

Oct 14th, 2025 - I n his laboratory at the University of Poitiers in France, Abderrazak El Albani contemplates the rock glittering in his hands. To the untrained eye, the specimen resembles a piece of golden tortellini embedded in a small slab of black shale. To El Albani, a geochemist, the pasta-shaped component looks like the remains of a complex life-form that became fossilized when the sparkling mineral pyrite replaced the organism's tissues after death. But the rock is hundreds of millions of years older ... [Read More]

Oct 14th, 2025 - Craving ever new varieties in nature for experimentation, Darwin wrote to his good friend and botanist, Joseph Hooker , "I have a passion to grow orchid seeds…for love of Heaven favour my madness & have some lichens or mosses scraped off & sent me. I am a gambler & love a wild experiment." It seems that Darwin was not the only one to crave exotic flowers. Three centuries earlier, the Dutch were hot on the trail to expand their imperial power by collecting exotic specimens from all over ... [Read More]

Oct 14th, 2025 - This bird evolved a 'sword'...to avoid a fight. Sometimes nature surprises us with extraordinary products of evolution. One prime example is the extraordinary sword-billed hummingbird ( Ensifera ensifera ). These relatively small birds have carved a niche in the animal kingdom with their extraordinary morphology. They boast one of the world's longest bills, setting them apart in a world of aerial acrobats. Surprisingly, despite the namesake 'swords,' these hummingbirds do not employ their bills ... [Read More]

Oct 14th, 2025 - An eerie image of a brown hyena ( Parahyaena brunnea ) prowling the ruins of an abandoned diamond mining town in Namibia has won this year's Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. The haunting scene, titled 'Ghost Town Visitor,' shows the world's rarest hyena standing in front of a long-deserted building lit with an ethereal glow. To capture it, photographer Wim Van den Heever set up camera traps in the ghost town of Kolmanskop after discovering hyena tracks there nearly a decade ago. ... [Read More]

Oct 14th, 2025 - A biotech startup is taking the first real steps towards bringing the dodo bird back from extinction. No one has seen this bird since the late 17th century, but that doesn't mean it has been forgotten. On the contrary, the dodo bird is a clear example of human-driven extinction. It's a symbol easily recognized by many, yet humanity doesn't really know much about the dodo. That might soon change thanks to Colossal Biosciences, the company behind the de-extinction project. It's the same ... [Read More]

Oct 14th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Forests are the planet's lungs, drawing carbon from the air and exhaling life back into it. Yet for decades, these vital ecosystems have been shrinking at alarming rates, replaced by farmland, cities, and empty clearings. As climate anxiety rises, many have turned to tree-planting drives and billion-seedling pledges to restore Earth's green cover. But what if nature itself already holds the most powerful solution? A new study published in Nature suggests exactly that. ... [Read More]

Oct 13th, 2025 - Volunteers have found new pairs of powerful owls in South Australia's south-east, where the species is rarely seen. The owls' calls were recorded as part of an acoustic monitoring project across the state. The Friends of Bool and Hacks Lagoons has turned the recordings into a "sound bath", to grow appreciation in local bird diversity. Sounds from Australia's largest owl, which preys on possums and koalas, have been recorded on South Australia's Limestone Coast, and released as part of a bird ... [Read More]

Oct 13th, 2025 - , and to do our work we need to catch lizards—never an easy task with such fast, agile creatures. Years ago, one of us was in the Bahamas chasing a typically uncooperative lizard across dense and narrow branches, frustrated that its nimble agility was thwarting efforts to catch it. Only when finally captured did we discover this wily brown anole was . This astonishing observation set our research down an unexpected path. That chance encounter led us to collaborate with over 60 colleagues ... [Read More]

Oct 12th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Captive life does more than change routines for bears and pandas. It also changes the microscopic communities living in their guts, and for giant pandas in zoos, those communities shrink in variety compared to wild pandas. A new cross-species project led by Wei Guo of Chengdu Medical College ( CMC ) compared gut bacteria from giant pandas, red pandas, and Asiatic black bears living in nature and in captivity.  The team used 16S rRNA sequencing, a genetic method that ... [Read More]

Oct 12th, 2025 - It's official: the only Australian shrew is no more. The latest edition of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's , the world's most comprehensive global inventory on extinction risk , has declared the Christmas Island shrew is extinct. The news may not seem momentous. After all, most Australians know nothing of shrews and would be unaware this one species counted among our native fauna. But the shrew's extinction increases the tally of Australian mammals extinct since 1788 to ... [Read More]

Oct 12th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Humans stand apart from many other primates by taking more time to mature, relying on a supportive network of parents, grandparents, and community members during a long period of childhood. This extended period of growth has long been considered crucial for learning the skills required to thrive in a socially complex environment. For a while, scientists have connected this slow development to the considerable energy demands of a growing brain. Experts remain intrigued by ... [Read More]

Oct 11th, 2025 - When a scientist ventures out into the icy waters of the Arctic and notices two narwhals crossing and clanging their long, spiraling tusks with each other, they instinctively know that they should step aside. A fierce competition is going on. Narwhals, the mottled silver-grey cousins of bottlenose dolphins, are elusive, mysterious residents of the Arctic. Dubbed "corpse whales," they are infamous for their protruding tooth-like tusks that they manipulate for a variety of behaviors. In a study ... [Read More]

Oct 11th, 2025 - Number of endangered butterfly species also surging amid habitat destruction and global heating, finds study The number of wild bee species in Europe at risk of extinction has more than doubled over the past decade, while the number of endangered butterfly species has almost doubled. The jeopardy facing crucial pollinators was revealed by scientific studies for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list of threatened species , which found that at least 172 bee species ... [Read More]

Oct 10th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Twelve million years ago, a huge flightless predator known as a "terror bird" sprinted across tropical floodplains in what is now central Colombia. Archaeologists discovered a single broken leg bone – evidence that turns a fragment into a clear view of life in the Miocene. The study was led by Federico J. Degrange, a terror bird specialist, and included Siobhán Cooke, Ph.D., associate professor of functional anatomy and evolution at the Johns Hopkins ... [Read More]

Oct 10th, 2025 - Our robust Paranthropus cousins thrived in Africa for a million and a half years, making stone tools and sharing the landscape with different Homo species at the dawn of human cultural innovation. The first fossil hominins were discovered at the  beginning of the 20th century in South Africa , just over half a century after the publication of Darwin's milestone work  The Origin of Species  (published in 1859) set the foundation for evolutionary theory based on natural selection. ... [Read More]