Life
- Paleontology
Fossil mystery solved?
Experiments in a Florida swamp show how aquatic creatures can get trapped and preserved in amber, a form of hardened tree sap.
- Animals
Eat a Killer: Snake dines safely with strategic delays
An Australian snake kills dangerous frogs then waits for their defensive chemicals to degrade before eating them.
- Animals
Crowcam: Camera on bird’s tail captures bird ingenuity
Video cameras attached to tropical crows record the birds' use of plant stems as tools to dig out food.
- Paleontology
Just a quick bite
Saber-toothed cats living in North America around 10,000 years ago had a much weaker bite than modern big cats.
- Animals
Tough-guy bluebirds need a frontier
As western bluebirds recolonize Montana, the most aggressive males move in first, paving the way for milder-mannered dads to take over.
- Plants
Stalking the Green Meat Eaters
Pitcher plants in a New England bog hold little ecosystems in their leaves, and also act as indicators of the bog's ecological health.
- Animals
Not Your Ordinary Amphibians
They resemble mondo worms or perhaps eels and snakes. But caecilians (seh sil yenz) are actually legless amphibians, and along with deep sea fishes are among the least well known vertebrates on the planet. Some run to a meter or more in length. Although information on these elusive animals and photos of them are hard […]
- Paleontology
Unexpected Archive: Mammoth hair yields ancient DNA
Hair from ancient mammoths contains enough genetic material to permit reconstruction of parts of the animal's genome.
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- Animals
Honeybee mobs smother big hornets
Honeybees gang up on an attacking hornet, killing it by blocking its breathing.
- Paleontology
Bumpy Bones: Fossil hints that dinosaur had feathery forearms
A series of knobs on the forearm bone of a 1.5-meter-long velociraptor provides the first direct evidence of substantial feathers on a dinosaur of that size.
- Animals
Hybrid Power: Salamander invader ups survival of rare cousin
Mixed offspring of the endangered California tiger salamander and an invasive cousin survive better than either pure-bred species, raising tricky questions for conservationists.
