Biology

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 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 A 16-million-year-old ant queen trapped in amber has revealed the first fossil trace of her kind in the Western Hemisphere. The discovery shows that these small ground-living ants were already part of Caribbean forests millions of years ago, widening the known history of a group that still thrives on tropical forest floors today. Queen preserved in amber Encased in a clear piece of Dominican amber, the winged queen preserves the same compact body shape seen in her living ... [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 - 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 25th, 2026 - Prehistoric sexual proclivities helped to shape the human genome , according to a study 1 of genetic material from three female Neanderthal specimens. The analysis suggests that female Homo sapiens and male Neanderthals ( Homo neanderthalensis ) mated more often than did male H. sapiens and female Neanderthals. The findings show how behaviour can shape human evolution, says study co-author Alexander Platt, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Human ... [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 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 - 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 - 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 24th, 2026 - This year, in what it calls a " study ," Utah's Division of Wildlife Resources is killing off mountain lions in an effort to increase mule deer herds. It has hired trappers from the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food, authorizing them to dispatch lions with any method, including banned traps and neck snares. The study, covering roughly 8.6 million acres in six management units, will run for at least three years with the goal of indiscriminately exterminating "as many (lions) as possible." ... [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]

Feb 24th, 2026 - Fins washing up in the North Pacific suggest that orcas from one subspecies are snacking on other orcas, and researchers think that may explain their different social dynamics Biologists have seen signs of orca-on-orca predation in the North Pacific, and such cannibalism may explain why some orcas travel in large family groups. Two distinct subspecies of orcas , also called killer whales ( Orcinus orca ), are found in the North Pacific. Transient or Bigg's orcas, as their name suggests, are ... [Read More]

Feb 24th, 2026 - An analysis of 20 urine samples from chimpanzees in Uganda found byproducts of ethanol in at least 17 samples, indicating that apes ingest significant alcohol from the fermented fruit in their diet. Aleksey Maro knows far more than he cares to know about the urination habits of chimpanzees. But if you want to measure the alcohol intake of chimps in a Ugandan rain forest, where a breathalyzer is impractical, collecting urine for analysis is your only choice. To perfect his urine sampling ... [Read More]

Feb 24th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google For years, Spinosaurus has been portrayed as a dinosaur built for open-water hunting – a giant predator chasing prey through ancient seas. But new fossils from the Sahara are shifting that story. Researchers have identified the first new Spinosaurus species in more than a century. Named Spinosaurus mirabilis , it features a towering, scimitar-shaped skull crest and was discovered in sandstone formed by inland rivers – hundreds of miles from any ancient ... [Read More]

Feb 23rd, 2026 - By A newly-discovered ancient crocodile looked nothing like the low-slung, swamp-delling crocodiles you see today. Instead, it stood upright on long, slender legs and sprinted across dry land with the build of a greyhound. It ate small reptiles, amphibians and early mammals. More than 200 million years after this creature last roamed what is now the United Kingdom, scientists have formally identified it as a new species — and named it after a secondary school physics teacher in Wales. The ... [Read More]