22+ hour, 8+ min ago   (840+ words) A bizarre belemnite fossil from Wyoming has been identified as a new species, revealing the thickest known member of this ancient squid relative group. There’s a fossil in a Wyoming museum drawer that spent two decades being, essentially, a mystery…...

1+ day, 3+ hour ago   (1008+ words) Seattle coyotes live at nine times the density of Washington's wild lands, with fewer predators, fewer hunters, and far more to eat. Coyotes tend to avoid people. Yet they live far closer together in Seattle than in the wild country…...

1+ day, 14+ hour ago   (967+ words) Plateau pikas labeled as pests can actually help livestock gain more weight by keeping poisonous weeds from taking over valuable grazing plants. High on the grasslands of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau in western China, herders have spent decades trying to wipe…...

2+ day, 23+ hour ago   (926+ words) Tropical insects remain poorly tracked, but combining local knowledge, social media, and monitoring could guide better conservation worldwide. Insects rarely receive the same attention as larger animals, but human life depends on many of the jobs they do. They pollinate…...

3+ day, 2+ hour ago   (966+ words) Black bears follow temperature in fall but day length in spring, showing that different cues control their activity across hibernation. When the cold sets in, bears den. When it warms, they come out. That’s the short version, and it leaves…...

3+ day, 14+ hour ago   (1306+ words) Sixteen Asian elephants in Thailand gave up a trunk habit as soon as it stopped working, the first evidence of self-control in the species. Put a piece of fruit where an elephant can see it and smell it, and the…...

3+ day, 17+ hour ago   (1057+ words) Periodical cicadas have failed to return to many recovered forests, and new research suggests natural recolonization could take centuries. Periodical cicadas spend more than a decade underground before pushing out of the ground by the trillions, covering the trees for…...

3+ day, 22+ hour ago   (791+ words) A 23-million-year fossil record shows Africa's giant mammals slowly vanished over time because evolution stopped replacing them. Ten million years ago, an African floodplain carried more kinds of giant plant-eaters than most people could name today. Early relatives of elephants,…...

3+ day, 21+ hour ago   (777+ words) Trees protect wild animals from extreme heat and cold by keeping temperatures inside their cavities more stable than outside. Deep inside the trunk of an old tree, temperatures can remain surprisingly stable, even when the world outside is baking or…...

3+ day, 22+ hour ago   (759+ words) Rich in battery-metal nodules, the Pacific's vast Clarion-Clipperton Zone has become a deep-sea mining hotspot, holding 17 international exploration contracts. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone is home to an estimated 5,578 animal species, and roughly 88 to 92 percent of them lack scientific names. That single…...