Nature

For the first time, we have shown that a soft heel pad was crucial to how sauropod dinosaurs supported their immense weight, according to a new digital reconstruction of their feet. Sauropods, which weighed up to 50 tons and dominated the world’s ecosystems for around 100 million years, appear to have developed soft heel pads

Have you ever wondered just how much water plants need to grow, or indeed why they need it? Plants lose a lot of water when they take in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, so they need up to 300 grams of water to make each gram of dry plant matter. But it doesn’t have to

Sea sponges, among the oldest creatures in existence, let out what looks like a deep sea “sneeze” to filter out waste, researchers found in a new study. Using time-lapse video, researchers captured the behavior, which could help them better understand how sponges evolved.  “Our data suggest that sneezing is an adaptation that sponges evolved to keep

In a fascinating discovery, western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) at Zoo Atlanta have been caught summoning their keepers using a strange cough-sneeze hybrid. Only two other species have displayed this ability to create new vocalizations to attract our attention: zoo-housed chimpanzees and orangutans. Now, we can add gorillas to that list. Below, 24-year-old female

To date, Earth is the only planet we know of that has continents. Exactly how they formed and evolved is unclear, but we do know – because the edges of continents thousands of miles apart match up – that, at one time long ago, Earth’s landmass was concentrated in one big supercontinent. Since that’s not

In the case of future catastrophe, it’s often said cockroaches will be the last lifeform left standing on Earth. But there’s another, more mysterious bug living in the deep that could give roaches a run for their money. A group of football-sized isopods have been roaming the seafloor like giant, blown-up roly-poly bugs for 200 or

A new discovery about jumping spiders could challenge some pretty hefty human assumptions about the cognitive abilities of arthropods. According to a study that examined the motions of their eyes and bodies while they sleep, it’s possible that these tiny spiders are not just resting, but dreaming – entering a sleep state fascinatingly similar to

One of the most powerful and fascinating forces of nature is born of storms: great cracks of light that part the sky, flicking vast amounts of electricity into the surrounding atmosphere, cracking into the ground whenever it reaches it. Or that’s how we typically think of lightning. But the phenomenon has another manifestation, only relatively

Stingrays are no longer the silent residents of the sea scientists once thought them to be. Caught on camera, two different stingray species have been discovered making weird clicking sounds in a lucky discovery that has delighted marine ecologists – but also left them stumped. “That we only just realized that these commonly encountered stingrays

A turtle hospital in Florida said all the turtles they tested for the past four years have been female, a worrying trend it attributes to climate change. The temperature of the sand where the eggs are buried influences the sex of sea turtles. Males are already a small minority of sea turtles – outnumbered around

In spite of their reputation as living dinosaurs, birds have come a long way since the days of T. rex and friends.  Gone is the toothy rostrum, replaced by the more familiar beak. Their skeletons have adapted for flight, as have their forelimbs. Even their pelvis is twisted into a shape that their more ancient

Bacterial colonies would rather perform “evolutionary suicide“ than put up with cheater strains that leech off the colony without giving anything back.  That’s the finding made by a team of researchers who modeled how a colony responds to freeloading bacteria that consume more than their fair share. Bacteria often work together as a colony to survive, producing resources that

Birds’ brains are a bit of a mystery. Despite the small size of their noggins, parrots and corvids show remarkable intelligence, solving some puzzles as well as primates.  Previous studies have shown the brains of songbirds and parrots contain very large numbers of neurons in their forebrains, sometimes even more than monkeys. But while the

A bizarre seafloor creature covered with luminous orange, spaghetti-like tentacles recently made its internet debut in newly released video footage. The unusual pom-pom-shaped creature is actually a type of segmented marine worm known as a polychaete, and it belongs to an appropriately named group: spaghetti worms.  Researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI)

As antibiotic-resistant bacteria become increasingly challenging to defeat, consulting those who’ve been in battle with our ancient foe long before us just makes a whole lot of sense.  Viruses called bacteriophages have been clashing with bacteria since long before we even existed. So researchers from the University of California, San Diego, took a closer look

Scientists grew “synthetic embryos” from mice cells without using sperm, eggs, or a womb.  The process, a world first, was described in an issue of the peer-reviewed journal Cell on August 1. The technology could be a starting point to grow organs from scratch, Jacob Hanna of Weizmann’s Molecular Genetics Department, who headed the research team,

Experts in Chile on Tuesday were investigating the appearance of an enormous sinkhole, bigger than a tennis court, that has appeared near a copper mine in the Atacama desert. Experts were dispatched to examine the hole, some 32 meters (104 feet) across and twice as deep, which appeared in an area about 800 kilometers (nearly

Active for at least the last 700,000 years, and dominating the landscape of Hawaii, Mauna Loa is the largest shield volcano on Earth (above water, at least) – and scientific data reveals more about what might be enough to set off future eruptions. Looking at shifts in the ground tracked by GPS and satellite data,

Cave explorers have traversed what’s now the deepest known cave in Australia. On Saturday, a group of explorers discovered a 401-meter-deep cave, which they named Delta Variant, in Tasmania’s Niggly-Growling Swallet cave system within the Junee-Florentine karst area. Its depth just beat out its predecessor, the Niggly Cave, by about 4 meters. With a descent

The first mammals to return to the sea, more than 35 million years ago, had eyes for the deep. According to new research, the visual systems of modern whales, dolphins, and porpoises – collectively known as cetaceans – all derive from a common ancestor with powerful underwater vision. Both whales and hippos are thought to

The Earth had its shortest ever day this summer, thanks to a wobble in its axis which meant it completed a single spin in a fraction of a second less than 24 hours. June 29 was 1.59 milliseconds shorter than 86,400 seconds, or exactly 24 hours, according to the website timeanddate.com. In recent decades the Earth

Giant pandas were not always native only to China – and they didn’t always love bamboo. A pair of fossilized panda teeth, originally found in northwestern Bulgaria, suggests these lovable bears once roamed across Europe where they gobbled up much softer plants than their modern cousins. The Bulgarian gnashers do not belong to a direct

In the permanent twilight of the mesopelagic, a silent predator hunts. The enigmatic giant squid is rarely observed in its natural habitat. In the first videos of their kind, unveiled in 2021, marine scientists caught its hunting behavior in the wild – revealing for the first time how these monsters of the deep stalk and

A Polish scientific institute has categorized domestic cats as an “invasive alien species.”  The Polish Academy of Sciences has defined the house cat (Felis catus) as “alien” as it was domesticated in the Middle East and has deemed cats as “invasive” due to the “negative influence of domestic cats on native biodiversity,” they explained in a

A farm in England was the unlikely source of a Jurassic jackpot: A treasure trove of 183 million-year-old fossils. On the outskirts of Gloucestershire in the Cotswolds, beneath soil that is currently trampled under the hooves of grazing cattle, researchers recently uncovered the fossilized remains of fish, giant marine reptiles called ichthyosaurs, squids, insects, and

During a recent expedition to the largely unexplored depths of the northern Mid-Atlantic Ridge, marine researchers stumbled upon something odd: tiny holes excavated in the sediment, all arranged in dozens of relatively straight lines. Holes on the sea floor wouldn’t usually be too perplexing, but these were dotted in an incredibly neat and evenly spaced

Miners in Angola have uncovered a massive pink diamond that may be the biggest gem of its kind found in the past 300 years. The pink diamond is estimated to weigh 170 carats, making it just a smidge smaller than the 182-carat Daria-i-Noor diamond – the largest pink diamond in the world, which today is part of the Iranian

Once upon a time, when our planet Earth was very young and very new, there was not a single scrap of life on it to be found. Then, somewhere, somehow, some quirk of chemistry happened, and the molecular building blocks of our very first single-celled ancestors emerged: the amino acids and nucleic acids that came

Amongst thousands of impressions in a large rock surface, one stood out from the crowd. The imprint of a tough tubular exoskeleton topped with waving tentacles, now frozen in time, looked strikingly familiar, unlike any of its neighbors. It looked just like a relative of corals, anemones, and jellyfish from a sediment layer dated 20

The biggest shark in our oceans already has a reputation for being a gentle giant, and it seems there’s more to this than we ever realized. Whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) are filter feeders, thought to carefully comb the waters for tiny animals like krill. Among the litany of tiny swimmers they scoop up are greens

New footage showing a giant, peculiar-looking tentacled sea creature floating languidly in the depths of the Pacific Ocean has left researchers questioning if what they’re seeing is a new species. A team of scientists spotted the strange animal while on board the E/V Nautilus, a research vessel used by the Ocean Exploration Trust – a

Researchers have been able to use an analysis of ancient rock crystals – and the magnetism records locked inside them – to trace back the history of Earth’s inner core across hundreds of millions of years. Earth’s core, a dense hot blob of iron and nickel, is actually made up of two layers – the

Pollination is the trademark of flowering plants, with animal pollinators such as bees and birds sustaining the world’s food supplies – not to mention our cravings for coffee, honey, and macadamia nuts. But new research raises the possibility that animal-assisted pollination may have emerged in the sea, long before plants moved ashore. The study, conducted by

There’s something curious in the blood of black bears that allows them to hibernate for seven months a year while still remaining fit and healthy. Scientists aren’t sure what that something is, but a new study has helped close in on the mystery. If we humans tried to lie dormant for as long as a

The fungus Entomophthora muscae has a survival strategy that’s both fascinating and potentially going to put you off your next meal: it infects and ‘zombifies’ female houseflies before sending out irresistible chemical signals encouraging male houseflies into necrophilia. By luring these male flies into mating with zombified females, the fungus can transfer to the male fly

From sniffing out diabetes, cancers and positive COVID-19 cases to being disgustingly interested in poop, we all know dogs have a mighty powerful sense of smell. Yet researchers were surprised to see the sheer extent of the smell wiring within dog brains. Veterinary neuroimaging researcher Erica Andrews of Cornell University and colleagues have just mapped domestic dogs’

When you’re barely the size of an eyelash and on the hunt for fast-moving prey, having a bear trap strapped to your head might seem like a good idea. Of course, it’s all fun and games until it actually goes off. Even the slightest wobble in that trap’s arc could send your face on a

Microbes are the smallest known living organisms on Earth and can be found just about everywhere, even in the cold, Mars-like conditions of lava caves. On the island of Hawai’i, scientists recently found a marvelous assortment of novel microbes thriving in geothermal caves, lava tubes, and volcanic vents. These underground structures were formed 65 and 800

Earth’s deepest sources of water may not be as old as we once assumed. Based on samples taken from deep below the Colorado Plateau, the briny remnants of ancient seas that make up the base of many groundwater systems might not be so perfectly isolated from the world above. When researchers attempted to date the region’s Paradox

Colonies of ants can act a lot like neural networks, new research has revealed, with groups of the insects weighing up both external inputs and internal principles when making decisions about what to do as a collective. In this particular study, the team behind it looked at when and how ant colonies evacuated their nests

Approximately 365 million years ago, one group of fishes left the water to live on land. These animals were early tetrapods, a lineage that would radiate to include many thousands of species including amphibians, birds, lizards and mammals. Human beings are descendants of those early tetrapods, and we share the legacy of their water-to-land transition.

Penguins are no strangers to climate change. Their life history has been shaped by rising and falling temperatures, and their bodies are highly specialized for some of Earth’s most extreme conditions. And yet, scientists are concerned the evolutionary path of the penguin may be grinding to a halt, thanks to what appears to be the

As the first dinosaurs were finding their feet around 230 million years ago, the ancestors of modern mammals were also emerging. Somewhere along the way they developed a remarkable ability: to generate their own warmth.  This decisive evolutionary step towards endothermy – the ability to generate heat from within and keep a near-constant core body temperature even when

Beneath the Andes mountains in South America, Earth’s crust is dripping into the planet’s interior. Moreover, this has been occurring for millions of years – a long geological process that has produced telltale wrinkling and other features on the surface that scientists have discerned through modeling and experimentation. This might help us identify interior geological

Rare deep-sea brine pools discovered in the Red Sea may hold clues to environmental upheavals in the region that span millennia, and could even shed light on the origins of life on Earth, a new study finds. Deep-sea brine pools are extraordinarily salty or “hypersaline” lakes that form on the seafloor. They are among the

It might surprise you to know that even during the depths of sleep, your brain cycles through brief bouts of wakefulness.   These ‘micro-arousals’, as they are known, are too short to be remembered the next morning, but together they could help your brain consolidate your memories from the day before. Among sleeping mice, researchers publishing in

For more than 100 years, paleontologists have thought that a fossil discovered in South Australia was a powerful grave eagle (Taphaetus lacertosus). Now, new research has revealed its true taxonomy: it’s a vulture, and it’s the first one discovered in the country. The fossil is that of a Cryptogyps lacertosus (meaning powerful hidden vulture) and this

The oceans are full of magical marine life that have spawned ecosystems brimming with biodiversity. Corals, which come in all shapes, sizes and colors, are no exception. Some species even glow in the dark. Now a team of Israeli scientists have figured out why that might be so. With glowing green and yellow tentacles, deep-reef