Search Results for: Vertebrates
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1,512 results
- Animals
Homing Lobsters: Fancy navigation, for an invertebrate
Spiny lobsters are the first animals without backbones to pass tests for the orienteering power called true navigation.
- Paleontology
Wings Aplenty: Dinosaur species had feathered hind limbs
A team of Chinese paleontologists has discovered fossils of a small, feathered dinosaur that they say had four wings.
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Hey, we’re richer than we thought!
The latest inventory of life in the United States has turned up an extra 100,000 species of plants, animals, and fungi.
- Paleontology
Sea Dragons
About 235 million years ago, as the earliest dinosaurs stomped about on land, some of their reptilian relatives slipped back into the surf, took on an aquatic lifestyle, and became ichthyosaurs—Greek for fish lizards.
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Blood cues sex choice for parasites
Malaria parasites shift their female-biased production of offspring toward a more evenly balanced sex ratio as an infection proceeds.
- Health & Medicine
Making Bone: Novel form of vitamin D builds up rat skeleton
A newly synthesized form of Vitamin D induces bone-making cells to capture calcium and fortify bone mass in rats, suggesting it might work against osteoporosis in people.
- Paleontology
Dear Mummy: Rare fossil reveals common dinosaur’s soft tissue
A mummified dinosaur unearthed in Montana a year ago is giving scientists a rare peek at what the creature's muscles and other soft tissues may have looked like.
- Health & Medicine
Young Women Don’t Bone Up on Soy
Among the many reported nutritional benefits of diets rich in soy is a strengthening of bone in postmenopausal women. For these Golden Girls, who face an increasing risk of osteoporosis, soy-based foods can provide much-needed assistance in limiting the inevitable loss of bone. Although soybeans are best known for their oil, their protein is also […]
- Paleontology
Learning from the Present
New field studies of unfossilized bones, as well as databases full of information about current fossil excavations and previous fossil finds, are providing insights into how complete—or incomplete—Earth's fossil record may be.
- Ecosystems
Famine reveals incredible shrinking iguanas
Marine iguanas in the Galápagos Islands are the first vertebrates known to reduce their size during a food shortage and then regrow to their original body lengths.
- Health & Medicine
Puffer Fish Genomes Swim into View
The tightly packed genomes of two puffer fish species have been deciphered.
- Paleontology
Bone Crushers: Teeth reveal changing times in the Pleistocene
Tooth-fracture incidence among dire wolves in the fossil record can indicate how much bone the carnivores crunched and, therefore, something about the ecology of their time.
