Bumblebees Make Decisions The Same Way You Do
Bumblebees visit hundreds of flowers every single day, which means they have to make hundreds of fast decisions in a row about exactly where to land next. Scientists have long wondered how a creature with such a tiny brain manages to do this so efficiently, and a new study from researchers in Germany has finally […]
Turns Out The T. Rex Moved Like A Giant Chicken
Everything you thought you knew about how a T. rex moved might be wrong, and it was a 21-year-old college student in Maine who figured it out. Adrian Boeye, a senior at the College of the Atlantic, took careful measurements of leg and foot bones from four well-preserved T. rex skeletons held in museums across […]
How Two Animals Invented The Same Defense Mechanism
A wasp and a frog have almost nothing in common, yet scientists just discovered that both creatures independently invented the exact same chemical weapon to protect themselves from predators. Researchers at the University of Queensland made the surprising find while studying how certain wasps and frogs produce a toxin that triggers intense pain in anything […]
Thousands Of Blue Glow In The Dark Snails Return Home
Thousands of tiny snails no bigger than a fingernail just made an extraordinary journey of more than 15,000 miles to return to their island homes in French Polynesia, and they arrived glowing. Before each snail was released into the wild, conservationists placed a small dot of UV reflective paint on its shell, causing the nocturnal […]
Listed As Extinct For Millennia But Hiding In Plain Sight
Scientists just made a discovery so rare it has almost never happened before in the entire history of wildlife research. Two species of marsupials believed to have vanished from the earth more than 6,000 years ago have been found alive and well in the remote rainforests of New Guinea, the large tropical island just north […]
How NASA Is Helping Giant Tortoises Home
When Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands in 1835, giant tortoises were still lumbering freely across Floreana Island in great numbers, serving as the quiet architects of the entire ecosystem around them, grazing vegetation, clearing paths, and spreading seeds across the landscape. Within just a few decades, heavy hunting by passing ships and the arrival […]
Escaped Dog Returns With The Proudest Walk of Shame
Ericka Tucker has a dog with one very particular and very impressive talent: the uncanny ability to slip out of a securely fenced yard without anyone witnessing exactly how she does it, earning herself the nickname the shapeshifter from her own family. After one recent great escape, however, the little adventurer’s big sister dog was […]
Meet Mr. Pickles The Angriest Baby Goat On The Internet
Mr. Pickles is a pint-sized baby goat with the energy of a tornado, the attitude of a full-grown rockstar, and absolutely zero interest in following anyone else’s rules. His owner, Laycee Gwyther, quickly discovered that her tiny goat had one particular hobby that was fast becoming a very real problem: using his small but surprisingly […]
This Cat Beat A Coyote And Then Graduated Six Months Later
Kyle the orange cat had already beaten incredible odds when a passerby spotted him fighting off a coyote four times his size on a California street and rushed him to the San Diego Humane Society for urgent care. He survived the attack with wounds to his neck and chest, but his real journey was truly […]
The Ancient Smiling Fossil That Has The Internet Delighted
When Christine Clark set out for a Boxing Day walk along the beach on Holy Island in northern England, she was simply hunting for the small disc-shaped fossils that locals have been lovingly collecting on that stretch of coast for over a thousand years. But something entirely unexpected stopped her right in her tracks: a […]