Did Humans Nearly Go Extinct 900,000 Years Ago? A Biologist Explains
At some point in the deep past, humans may have come frighteningly close to disappearing altogether. Here’s what…
It Was Longer Than A Person
Long before dinosaurs, Earth’s forests were ruled by a many-legged giant. Here’s why this millipede’s size still challenges…
Meet The Squirrel That Turns Off Its Brain For 8 Months Every Year — A Biologist Explains
The Arctic ground squirrel survives conditions that would cause irreparable brain damage in almost any other mammal on…
Anthropologists Still Can’t Agree On The Answer
The chin is one of our most familiar features, yet scientists still debate why we evolved it. Here’s…
Meet The Silver-Backed Chevrotain — A Mouse-Deer That Vanished For 25 Years, Rediscovered By A Camera Trap
Once written off as extinct, the silver-backed chevrotain forces scientists to confront how much of biodiversity still lives…
Meet The Fish That Can Recognize Human Faces — A Biologist Explains
A clever tropical fish has flipped how biologists are thinking about memory, brains and visual recognition in the…
Projected human land-use pressures and natural habitat conversion risk within global terrestrial protected areas
Protected Planet Report 2020 (UNEP-WCMC and IUCN, 2021). Pringle, R. M. Upgrading protected areas to conserve wild biodiversity.…
How ants gave up armor to build some of the largest societies on Earth
The classic thought experiment about a horse-sized duck and a hundred duck-sized horses is more than a joke.…
Deep conservation of cis-regulatory elements and chromatin organization in echinoderms uncover ancestral regulatory features of animal genomes
Sebé-Pedrós, A. et al. The dynamic regulatory genome of capsaspora and the origin of animal multicellularity. Cell 165,…
Repeated adaptation in sperm-related and neuronal genes in brood parasitic birds
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This…
No Red Blood Cells? No Problem, For This Noodlefish
Antarctic icefish are famous for living without red blood cells, but they are not alone. A species of…
Right Between Meerkats and Wild Dogs
Image credits: Satya deep. If you ask some people, they’ll tell you humans are wired to be monogamous…