The Baby Elephant Who Won Over The Internet And Her Own Public Vote
The Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington DC has not had a successful Asian elephant birth in nearly 25 years. So when a calf was born at 1:15 in the morning on the second day of February, keepers who had been waiting for this moment for two decades were, by their own description, overjoyed. The calf […]
The Oldest Dog On Record Just Got Even Older
Dogs have been living alongside humans for a very long time, but two new studies published in the journal Nature just pushed that timeline back by about 5,000 years and introduced us to the oldest dog whose identity has ever been confirmed through genetics. Researchers examined ancient DNA from the bones of more than 200 […]
The Most Complete Sea Monster Skull Ever Found
A fossil hunter named Phil Jacobs was walking along the Jurassic Coast in Dorset, England when he spotted what appeared to be a strange piece of snout poking out of the beach. He filmed it, shared it with renowned fossil collector Steve Etches, and what followed was one of the most dramatic paleontological discoveries in […]
The Monarch Butterfly Population Just Jumped 64 Percent
Every winter, millions of monarch butterflies make one of the most extraordinary journeys in the natural world, traveling up to 2,800 miles from Canada and the United States to cluster on oyamel fir trees in the mountains of central Mexico, their wings blanketing the forest in a sight unlike anything else on Earth. For years, […]
She Beat Cancer And Then Adopted A Hawk
When the first Covid lockdown arrived, most people tried baking sourdough or following along with an exercise video. Candida Meyrick did something rather more unusual: she adopted a Harris Hawk fledgling, and the decision changed her life in ways she is still discovering. Candida, who had come through breast cancer treatment five years earlier, was […]
Dog Finds A Message In A Bottle That Crossed The Atlantic From Canada
On a wildly stormy morning on a beach in northeast Scotland, a dog named Maggie was doing what dogs do best: sniffing everything in sight. Her owner Mike Scott, a photographer who walks his dogs at St Cyrus in Aberdeenshire almost every day, noticed Maggie circling a dark glass bottle washing up from the waves. […]
The Internet Is Obsessed With This Cat Who Ignores The Canada-US Border
On a quiet street in British Columbia, right where Canada meets the United States, lives a cat who has decided that international borders simply do not apply to him. His name is Louis Vuitton, and every single day he leaps across a narrow ditch that marks the official boundary between the two countries, wanders into […]
This Is Why Cats Always Land On Their Feet
Everyone has heard that cats always land on their feet, but scientists have been trying to figure out exactly how they do it for more than 300 years. A new study published in The Anatomical Record has brought researchers a meaningful step closer to an answer, and the secret turns out to be hiding in […]
Meet Scout The Dog Who Finds Other Lost Dogs
When a dog goes missing in Minnesota, a group of dedicated volunteers drops everything and gets to work. The Retrievers, a fully volunteer organization based in Minneapolis, has made it their mission to reunite lost dogs with their families, taking each case from the first frantic phone call all the way through to a happy […]
The Greatest Wildlife Comeback Story Belongs To The Vultures
For most of the twentieth century, a bird with a nearly ten-foot wingspan was completely missing from the skies above the Alps, wiped out by hunters who mistakenly believed it was a danger to livestock and children. The bearded vulture, one of the most dramatic birds on Earth, was shot to extinction across the entire […]