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70% Of America’s Mussels Are Vanishing. Then 5 New Ones Turned Up
North America's freshwater mussels are disappearing at a staggering rate, with entire species vanishing before scientists can even name them.…
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A Glassy Black Beetle Indicates the Antilles Were Settled Twice
A glassy black beetle hiding in the cloud forests of the Dominican Republic has left scientists questioning everything they thought…
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This Brainless Sea Blob Has No Ears, but It Feels Sound
Sea squirts have no ears, no brain, and spend their adult lives glued to the ocean floor, yet new research…
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Albatross Numbers Fell 67% in 64 Years. Can Evolution Catch Up?
Black-browed albatrosses have soared the southern oceans for millions of years, but a new study reveals that the forces reshaping…
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The New Australian Agency Designed to Catch Reptile Smugglers
Reptiles stuffed in socks, turtles swimming in bathtubs, and a black market worth billions: Australia's native wildlife is being smuggled…
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This Cockroach Looks Like a Rolled Die and People Keep It as a Pet
Most people recoil at the sight of a cockroach, but one species native to southern India has collectors and hobbyists…
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Scientists Filmed 19 Wild Indri and Found an Opera Singer’s Technique
Indri lemurs sing haunting duets that carry for miles through Madagascar's dense forests, and scientists just discovered their technique shares…
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One Fungus Can Kill 100% of a Frog Species. One Bacterium Stops It.
A deadly fungus has already driven hundreds of amphibian species to extinction, and scientists have yet to find a way…
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Why Petting a Rat Can Make Its Eyeballs Pop out of Its Head
A rat wrapped in cozy blankets gets a gentle pet from its owner, and suddenly its eyeballs begin vibrating and…
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Zombie Flies Hollow out Honeybees and May Explain Hive Collapse
A parasitic fly has found a way to turn honeybees into unwitting nurseries for its larvae, hijacking their behavior in…
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Ants Stolen as Babies and Raised by Killers
Some ant species have surrendered nearly every survival skill in favor of one brutal talent, and the colonies they build…
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A Beewolf Stings a Bee, Buries It Alive—Then Mummifies It
A female beewolf paralyzes a honeybee mid-flight, drags it underground, and then does something to the living victim that no…
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This 240-Million-Year-Old Species Sat in a Drawer for 60 Years
A skeleton sat tagged and forgotten in a London museum drawer for decades, and what scientists finally found inside it…
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Naserian the Pangolin Was Tracked Daily. A Live Fence Killed Her.
Naserian was a GPS-tracked giant pangolin with a dedicated research team watching her every move, yet something still found a…
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3 Captive Crocodiles Stayed Free. The Wild One Tried to Go Home.
When researchers released captive saltwater crocodiles into the wild, the animals they expected to bolt for home surprised everyone, and…
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Crowds of Hikers Don’t Silence Gibbons, But Highway Traffic Does
Highway noise is reshaping the behavior of endangered white-handed gibbons in Malaysia's rainforests, and the consequences stretch far beyond a…
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This Fish Knows Its Own Face — and It’s Still on Your Plate
Some fish recognize their own reflection, remember individual rivals, and wield tools to crack open prey. Yet they remain among…
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A Rotated Fruit Box Reveals Asian Elephants’ Surprising Self-Control
Researchers dangled fruit in front of Asian elephants, then pulled a sneaky trick, and what the elephants did next is…
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Look Inside a Heron’s Beak and You’ll Find One Very Odd Tongue
A heron's tongue hides features so unusual that scientists had to coin a new term just to describe one of…
Articles
Pigs Are as Smart as Dogs. Most Never See the Sun.
Billions of animals raised for food share emotional lives as rich as the pets we adore, yet most spend their…
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El Niño Killed 70% of Galápagos Penguins in 1998. It’s Back.
A powerful El Niño is bearing down on the Galápagos Islands, and scientists warn that the archipelago's most iconic species…
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What Looked Like a Fern Was Actually a 560-Million-Year-Old Animal Fossil
A rock tumbled off a cliff in a Norwegian sheep field, split open, and revealed something that scientists say reshapes…
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Once Down to 22 Birds, Condors Return to the Sky Saturday
The California condor vanished from the wild entirely, but a decades-long fight to save the species has led to a…
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After H5N1 Hit New Zealand, Scientists Found 107 New Viruses
When scavenging birds from East Asia and Antarctica land in New Zealand, they bring more than feathers. Researchers swabbed dozens…
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This Worm Has One Head and Hundreds of Branching Rear Ends
A single head anchors this polychaete worm, but what happens at the other end defies everything we thought we knew…
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It’s Not Just the Cold: What Really Puts Bears to Sleep
Scientists long assumed cold weather alone sends black bears into hibernation, but new research tracking thousands of hours of footage…
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Lake Sturgeon May Live 400 Years, Not 150, New Research Says
Scientists assumed they had lake sturgeon figured out, but a new mathematical model built on decades of captured fish suggests…
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Missing Since 1985, the Spinach Pipefish Is Back on Record
For 40 years, a bizarre freshwater fish from the jungles of Papua New Guinea vanished from the scientific record entirely,…
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Why Scientists Say You Should Never Feed a Wild Dolphin
Millions of tourists flock to beaches every year hoping to hand-feed wild dolphins, believing it brings them closer to nature.…
Articles
A 2-Foot Worm Grows Inside a Cricket, Then Steers It to Water
Inside a cricket's body, something has taken control of its brain and is steering it toward water. The horsehair worm's…
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Muddy Water Doesn’t Scatter Fish. It Draws Them Together.
As human development muddies rivers and lakes across the globe, aquatic life faces a growing crisis in finding food and…
Articles
This Ibex Went Extinct, Was Cloned, Then Went Extinct Again
One animal holds a world record so bizarre it required the invention of modern cloning just to make it possible.…
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Damselfish Help Corals Heal 55% Faster and Scientists Aren’t Sure Why
A tiny saltwater fish is doing something extraordinary to injured coral reefs in the Indo-Pacific, and scientists who documented the…
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Scientists Found a ‘Balrog’ Cricket in a Greek Military Tunnel
Deep inside a military tunnel on a tiny Greek island, scientists stumbled onto a cricket species so strange they named…
Articles
The Alien-Looking Fish That Sees Through Its Transparent Head
Somewhere in the ocean's depths swims a small fish with a see-through skull, tubular eyes, and visual tricks that break…
Articles
This Australian Lizard Sips Rain That Rolls Down Its Spikes
The thorny devil survives Australia's brutal Outback without ever raising its head to drink, and the real mechanism behind its…
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Joro Spiders Eat Tiny Flies, Not the Bugs Scientists Feared
When giant Joro spiders started colonizing the eastern United States, scientists feared these invasive arachnids would devastate native species by…
Articles
Your Cellphone Data Helped Reveal How 37 Animal Species React to Us
Researchers combined GPS collars on thousands of wild animals with anonymized cellphone location data to expose something surprising about how…
Articles
What Were Bengal Tigers Doing at a Mexican Fuel Smuggling Site?
When Mexican authorities raided a suspected fuel smuggling operation near the U.S. border, they expected to find stolen diesel. What…
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Neon Squid Launch, Jet, and Glide to Escape Predators Mid-Ocean
A group of scientists off the coast of Japan watched in disbelief as nearly a hundred glowing squids burst from…
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Half Shark, Half Stingray, All Predator
Lurking beneath the sand with unhinged jaws ready to fire in under a blink, angel sharks blur the line between…
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Madagascar’s Middle-Finger Primate Isn’t the Loner We Assumed
Scientists long wrote off the aye-aye as a solitary oddity, a nocturnal Madagascan primate with rodent teeth and a taste…
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An Ice Age Toad Sat Hidden in a Museum for 70 Years
A fossil collected from the La Brea Tar Pits in the 1950s spent decades cataloged and forgotten in a museum…
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A Microphone 18 Inches off the Ground Cracked a 200-Year Bat Mystery
For nearly two centuries, scientists could neither confirm nor dismiss reports of an African bat lurking somewhere in Europe. The…
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These Frogs Grew Babies in Their Stomachs. Both Are Gone.
Female gastric-brooding frogs did something that should have been biologically impossible, and scientists had barely confirmed it before both species…
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190 Miles, 2 States, 11,000 Feet: Inside a Mule Deer Migration
Scientists collared dozens of mule deer around Grand Teton National Park and watched them do something no researcher expected, crossing…
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Avoiders, Adapters, Exploiters: How Seattle Birds Respond to Urban Growth
Seattle's explosive urban growth forced local birds to make a choice, and researchers spent nearly three decades watching what happened…
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The Distress Signals Cat Video Viewers Mistake for Cuteness
Those hisses, escape attempts, and bites in your favorite cat videos may not mean what you think they mean, and…
Articles
First Evidence a Vertebrate Survives Disease by Seeking Cold
When infection strikes, most animals run a fever to fight back, but a group of European tadpoles does something that…
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Police Wrangle 300-Lb Gator Outside School 2 Days Before Classes
A massive gator showed up outside a Florida high school just before the first day of classes, prompting police to…