The Shark With No Fixed Color The blue shark (Prionace glauca) might not be blue in the way anyone assumed, and it might not stay blue for long. Researchers at the City University of Hong Kong dissected the skin of this species and found something inside its dermal denticles, the tiny tooth-like scales that cover … Read more
Two in Three Cats Have a Side Of 408 YouTube videos showing cats asleep or resting, roughly two out of three cats came down on their left side. That is not a coin flip. Behavioral neuroscientist Onur Güntürkün of Ruhr University Bochum, working with researchers from the University of Bari Aldo Moro, Medical School Hamburg, … Read more
The reptile that spent a century in two museums, in two pieces, under two roofs Sphenodraco scandentis lived in the Solnhofen Archipelago of what is now Germany more than 145 million years ago, in the Late Jurassic. It was a rhynchocephalian, a lizard-like reptile related to lizards but not one of them. For close to … Read more
Put an adult female common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus) in a cage with two bats she has never met, seal the three of them in together for seven days, then release all three into a shared space packed with more than twenty other bats. Nine weeks later, she is still grooming those same two strangers … Read more
Something in Less Than a Millimeter of Eye A deep-sea fish larva just 0.2 inches (half a centimeter) long, with eyes smaller than 0.04 inches (under a millimeter) across, is carrying a type of eye cell that no vertebrate has ever been shown to have. In February 2026, a team led by Dr. Fabio Cortesi, … Read more
The Hell Heron of Jenguebi A newly named dinosaur pulled from the Sahara Desert in Niger turns out to have died as a juvenile at roughly 26 feet (8 m) long. Spinosaurus mirabilis, described by a 20-person team led by Paul Sereno, a professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago, in … Read more
The mother ate badly. The pup paid permanently. A C57BL/6 laboratory mouse pup whose mother ate a low-fiber diet while nursing it nearly doubled in weight by weaning. The researchers then put it on a healthy, fiber-balanced diet for nine weeks. The Proteobacteria kept blooming in its gut. The weight kept climbing. The mother’s three-week … Read more
Bees Dance Worse to a Bored Room The waggle dance of the Western honey bee (Apis mellifera) has always been sold as fixed code: a forager returns to the hive, runs a tight figure eight on the vertical comb, and hands out the same coordinates to whoever happens to be standing nearby. A study published … Read more
The One-Tonne Dinosaur With a Sail on Its Back In 2025, in the journal Papers in Palaeontology, Dr. Jeremy Lockwood and his colleagues named a new dinosaur: Istiorachis macarthurae, an iguanodontian, a member of the plant-eating dinosaur group that includes Iguanodon. It comes from Early Cretaceous rock on England’s Isle of Wight, laid down more … Read more
One Snake, Two Costumes Two snakes pulled from the sandy wadis around AlUla, in Saudi Arabia’s Hejaz region, look nothing alike. One is brick-red with a solid black collar wrapped just behind its eyes, as if its head had been dipped in black paint before the rest of the body was left its natural reddish … Read more