Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Animals
Shhh! Is that scrape a caterpillar scrap?
A series of staged conflicts reveals the first known acoustic duels in caterpillars.
- Paleontology
New Fossils Resolve Whale’s Origin
The first discovery of early whale fossils with key ankle bones intact provides compelling paleontological evidence that whales are closely related to many living ungulates, a relationship already supported by molecular data.
- Animals
Gimme, Gimme, Gimme!
Hungry chicks cheeping in their nest have inspired a whole branch of scientific inquiry.
- Ecosystems
Fierce invader steals nests from a native fish
The round goby, a Eurasian fish that has invaded the Great Lakes, is causing the decline of the mottled sculpin by displacing the native from its spawning sites.
- Animals
Social Cats
Who says cats aren't social? And other musings from scientists who study cats in groups.
- Animals
Even deep down, the right whales don’t sink
A right whale may weigh some 70 tons, but unlike other marine mammals studied so far, it tends to float rather than sink at great depths.
- Animals
It’s a snake! No, a fish. An octopus?
An as-yet-unnamed species of octopus seems to be protecting itself by impersonating venomous animals from sea snakes to flatfish.
- Paleontology
New fossil sheds light on dinosaurs’ diet
Vestiges of soft tissue preserved in a 70-million-year-old Mongolian fossil suggest that some dinosaurs could have strained small bits of food from the water and mud of streams and ponds, just like some modern aquatic birds do.
- Paleontology
Completing a titan by getting a head
When paleontologists unearthed the skeleton of a 70-million-year-old titanosaur in Madagascar in the late 1990s, they also recovered something that had been missing from previous such finds: a skull that matched the body.
- Paleontology
That’s no footprint, it’s got no toes
The impressions near Isona, Spain, long thought to be fossilized dinosaur footprints may actually record the feeding behavior of stingrays.
- Animals
Big woodpeckers trash others’ homes
Pileated woodpeckers destroy in an afternoon the nesting cavities that take endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers 6 years to excavate.
- Animals
When rare species eat endangered ones
To cut down on their salmon smolt catch, Caspian terns were encouraged to move from one island to another in the Columbia River.
