Life

  1. Paleontology

    Big Gulp? Neck ribs may have given aquatic beast unique feeding style

    The fossilized neck bones of a 230-million-year-old sea creature have features suggesting that the animal's snakelike throat could flare open and create suction to pull in prey.

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  2. Animals

    Pirates of the Amphibian: Males fertilize eggs of another guy’s gal

    For the first time among amphibians, scientists have found frogs that sneak their sperm onto egg clutches left by another mating pair.

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  3. Plants

    A new, slimy method of self-pollination

    When all else fails for pollination, a Chinese herb in the ginger family resorts to something botanists say they haven't seen before: a do-it-yourself oil slick.

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  4. Animals

    Super Bird: Cooing doves flex extra-fast muscles

    Muscles that control a dove's cooing belong to the fastest class of muscles known.

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  5. Animals

    Owls use tools: Dung is lure for beetles

    Burrowing owls' habit of bringing mammal dung to their burrows attracts edible beetles and counts as form of tool use.

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  6. Animals

    Mom bears more sons when she gets extra bouquets

    When researchers spiff up a male starling's courtship by delivering some extra bouquets to his mate on his behalf, the couple tends to produce more sons than usual.

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  7. Animals

    Policing egg laying in insect colonies

    Kinship by itself can't explain the vigilante justice of some ant, bee, and wasp workers.

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  8. Animals

    How dingoes got down under

    DNA analysis suggests that Australia got its famous dingoes from a very few dogs brought along with people fanning out from East Asia some 5,000 years ago.

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  9. Plants

    Smokey the Gardener

    Wildfire smoke by itself, without help from heat, can trigger germination in certain seeds, but just what the vital compound in that smoke might be has kept biologists busy for years.

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  10. Paleontology

    Growth Spurt: Teenage tyrannosaurs packed on the pounds

    Detailed analyses of tyrannosaur fossils suggest that the creatures experienced an extended growth spurt during adolescence.

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  11. Plants

    Lowering lilies on the tree of life

    Water lilies may belong on the lowest branch of the family tree of flowering plants, along with a shrub called Amborella.

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  12. Paleontology

    Fossil find extends ants’ ancient lineage

    The recently described, 92-million-year-old fossil of a primitive worker ant pushes back the first record of its particular subfamily by 40 million years, forcing researchers to reevaluate their ideas about the early evolution of these insects.

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