Biology

Jan 8th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Under sidewalks, orchards, and seaside cliffs, one Argentine ant species has built a colony stretching about 3,700 miles across southern Europe. Scientists think this linked network of nests could hold hundreds of billions of ants , possibly approaching half a trillion workers and queens. The colony belongs to the invasive Argentine ant Linepithema humile , and its tunnels follow the coasts of Portugal, Spain, France, and Italy. Building a giant network Researchers call ... [Read More]

Jan 8th, 2026 - Where did our species first emerge? Fossils discovered in Morocco dating back more than 773,000 years bolster the theory that Homo sapiens originally appeared in Africa, scientists said in a study Wednesday. The oldest Homo sapien fossils , dating from over 300,000 years ago, were found at the Jebel Irhoud northwest of Marrakesh. Our cousins the Neanderthals  mostly lived in Europe, while more recent additions to the family, the Denisovans, roamed Asia. This has prompted an enduring ... [Read More]

Jan 8th, 2026 - Jurassic Park , knowing it was pure fantasy. Fun fantasy, sure, but still nonsense. Amber-trapped mosquitoes reviving entire ecosystems was very much in Hollywood science territory, heavy on confidence and light on truth. And yet, decades later, we're learning that mosquitoes really do carry shockingly detailed biological records of the worlds they move through. No dinosaurs, obviously. But something almost as strange. in Florida spent months collecting more than 50,000 mosquitoes across a ... [Read More]

Jan 8th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google A crab-like body has evolved at least five separate times in ten-legged crustaceans, and scientists keep finding the same pattern. Researchers in Germany compared crab-shaped groups with their relatives, looking for clues about why evolution repeats itself. Their work suggests that once a crustacean starts folding its tail under a wide shell, many internal parts reorganize in step. That mix of predictability and odd detail is why this crab theory is still relevant over a ... [Read More]

Jan 8th, 2026 - Vast swathes of the country's trees have been killed off by droughts and infestations, in a trend sweeping across Europe. A shift towards more biodiverse cultivation could offer answers E ven the intense green of late spring cannot mask the dead trees in the Harz mountains. Standing upright across the gentle peaks in northern Germany , thousands of skeletal trunks mark the remnants of a once great spruce forest. Since 2018, the region has been ravaged by a tree-killing bark beetle outbreak, ... [Read More]

Jan 8th, 2026 - Arctic marine life is notoriously difficult to study because of its remoteness. But drones have enabled whales to be monitored and diagnosed while being minimally invasive, according to a new study. By having drones collect samples of whale breath or "blow" from humpback, sperm and fin whales in the northeast Atlantic to screen for pathogens , researchers have "confirmed for the first time that a potentially deadly whale virus" is "circulating above the Arctic Circle," said a news release about ... [Read More]

Jan 7th, 2026 - Science The Giant, Voracious Sea Lions That Humans Cannot Stop Killing the protected animals may be the only way to stop them from eating too many of the Pacific Northwest's endangered salmon. Francois Le Diascorn / Gamma-Rapho / Getty Save Listen − 1.0x + 0:00 11:41 Of all the schemes that humans have devised to keep sea lions from gorging on the salmon of the Columbia River basin, none has worked for long. Local officials and researchers have chased sea lions with boats and peppered ... [Read More]

Jan 7th, 2026 - A recent study suggests that North Africa may be a key place to look. A group of 773,000-year-old hominin fossils from Morocco may shed new light on when our species branched off from the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans. A team of anthropologists recently examined a collection of fossil hominin jawbones, teeth, and vertebrae that belong to hominins who probably lived very close in time to our species' last common ancestor with Neanderthals and Denisovans. They reveal a little more ... [Read More]

Jan 7th, 2026 - Scientists also name an overlooked snowdrop growing in the UK and a fruit that tastes like banana and guava A zombie fungus that springs from a trapdoor and a flame-like shrub named after the fire demon in the Studio Ghibli film Howl's Moving Castle are among the species of plant and fungi named by scientists in 2025. A list of 10 "weird and wonderful" new species was compiled by scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens (RBG), Kew and their international partners, who together named 125 new ... [Read More]

Jan 7th, 2026 - When a grizzly bear attacked a group of fourth- and fifth-graders in western Canada in late November 2025, it sparked more than a rescue effort for the 11 people injured – four with severe injuries . Local authorities began trying to find the specific bear that was involved in order to relocate or euthanize it, depending on the results of their assessment . The attack, in Bella Coola, British Columbia, was very unusual bear behavior and sparked an effort to figure out exactly what had ... [Read More]

Jan 7th, 2026 - Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. . A round 66 million years ago, tragedy struck the dinosaurs when a massive space rock barrelled into what's now the Yucatán Peninsula in southeast Mexico. This killed off around 75 percent of all the planet's species, dinos among them. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Scientists have long thought that ammonites—extinct, curly-shelled mollusks related to today's squids and octopuses—perished in this disaster, known as ... [Read More]

Jan 7th, 2026 - We've learned from the best. In the high country of Colorado, scientists are doing something unusual to manage rivers. Instead of pouring concrete or digging engineered channels, they're deploying hand-built wooden dams. But these aren't your average structures. It's a blue print we took directly from beavers. The goal is to restart the natural processes that once kept mountain water clean, slow, and stable, something desperately needed after devastating wildfires . This beaver-inspired ... [Read More]

Jan 5th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Emerald ash borers have carved a deadly path through North America's ash trees, leaving foresters with few practical options at large scales. Now, scientists in Minnesota have uncovered an unexpected ally already living in those forests: native fungi that can rapidly kill the invasive beetles. In lab tests, four locally sourced fungal strains cut emerald ash borer survival to just a few days, pointing to a new, biologically based way to slow the pest's spread. The ... [Read More]

Jan 5th, 2026 - Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. . W hen a young adult leaves home to work or study, there's a good chance they'll settle into life in a new locale. A Pew Research Center survey found only 18 percent of United States adults between the ages of 25 and 34 live in their parents' homes, despite the potential advantages of familiarity and lower costs. In contrast, for many species, females return to their homelands to reproduce. Such "natal philopatry" has been recorded in animals as ... [Read More]

Jan 4th, 2026 - The earliest ankylosaur flaunted metre-long spikes and a tail weapon. In the rugged badlands of Morocco's Middle Atlas Mountains, a dinosaur bristling with spikes once lumbered across the Jurassic floodplains. It was not the squat, club-tailed Ankylosaurus of textbooks, but something far stranger. A new partial skeleton of Spicomellus afer has confirmed what palaeontologists long suspected: the world's oldest ankylosaur looked like no other animal, living or extinct. A Dinosaur Dressed to ... [Read More]

Jan 4th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Millions of years before modern Britain took shape, snakes moved across a warm and humid landscape filled with forests, rivers, and wetlands. Fossils from southern England now reveal one such snake, hidden in museum drawers for decades. Careful study has finally revealed a new species that helps scientists understand how modern snakes began. Researchers have named the species Paradoxophidion richardoweni . Fossil bones show a small snake that lived around 37 million years ... [Read More]