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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Fewer Than 250 Left: The Tiny Fish That Walks and Made History
A tiny, walking, permanently frowning fish living in just two small patches of ocean reef became the unlikely symbol of…
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This Bird Lies to Steal Food and It Works 20% of the Time
A small black bird in the African savannah has turned deception into a survival strategy, running a long con on…
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Baby Sidewinders Lure Lizards by Mimicking Insects with Their Tails
Juvenile sidewinder rattlesnakes have a hunting trick so precise and deceptive that small lizards walk straight into it, convinced they…
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Elephants, Dolphins, and Parrots Actually Have Names for Each Other
Humans have long assumed that names are one of our most distinctive traits, but new research into elephants, dolphins, and…
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Rare Red-Tailed Monkey Baby Spotted Clinging to Mom at Zoo Atlanta
A newborn Schmidt's guenon has made her debut at Zoo Atlanta, clinging to her mother in the Ford African Rainforest,…
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Rabies Is 100% Fatal — and the USDA Is Airdropping the Cure
Once rabies symptoms appear, survival becomes virtually impossible, yet a bold federal program is quietly working to stop the disease…
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How the Broadclub Cuttlefish Hacks Its Prey’s Vision
The broadclub cuttlefish never hides from its prey. Instead, it weaponizes its own skin against the prey's brain, turning color…
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96 Pythons in 10 Days: Meet Florida’s Challenge Champion
Every summer, hundreds of hunters descend on the Florida Everglades chasing cash prizes and invasive Burmese pythons, but this year…
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Termites Can’t Digest Plants, So They Farm Fungi Instead
Termites can't fully digest the plants they eat, so they solved the problem the way no other insect quite has:…
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How Chimps Use Rough Leaves to Strip Parasites from Their Gut
Every morning, before eating a single bite of food, sick chimpanzees perform a precise ritual with a specific type of…
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Colorblind Octopuses Can Perfectly Mimic Colors. How Do They Do It?
Octopuses can transform their skin into a flawless copy of nearly any texture or color in milliseconds, yet they cannot…
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The Newt That Engineers Water Currents to Win a Mate
When a male smooth newt enters a murky pond to court a mate, his body has already transformed in ways…
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Moon Bears Survived Bile Farms. Now They’re Learning to Trust Again.
Thousands of Asiatic black bears spend their lives imprisoned on bile farms, enduring conditions that would shock most people. But…
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The Ants That Become Living Grapes to Survive Drought
Some honeypot ant workers never forage, never fight, and never move again after taking their post. Instead, they sacrifice their…
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The Wasp That Zombifies Roaches and Leads Them on a Leash
The emerald jewel wasp has mastered a surgical strike so precise it turns a living cockroach into a compliant, grooming…
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The Chuckwalla Inflates Its Body into an Immovable Rock Plug
The chuckwalla has no venom, no sharp teeth, and no speed to outrun a predator. So when a coyote or…
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Sarcastic Fringehead is the Fish That Fights by Kissing Jaws
The sarcastic fringehead is a small saltwater fish with a jaw that can expand four times its normal width, and…
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Great Whites and Makos Hide a Speed Secret in Their Spines
Sharks have spent 400 million years engineering something far more sophisticated than teeth, and researchers just got their first real…
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How Banded Mongooses Turn Millipede Poison into Pest Repellent
Banded mongooses have discovered a survival trick so extreme it looks more like self-destruction than self-preservation. The toxic chemistry behind…
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Monarch Butterflies Left in Limbo as New Federal Rules Take Hold
Monarch butterflies, alligator snapping turtles, and dozens of other species sit on the edge of protection while a sweeping rewrite…