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Crack a snake egg partway through incubation and you find an animal that does not fit the space it is in. The embryo is already a long ribbon of vertebrae and muscle, stowed inside the shell wound…
A frog collected on the Marojejy massif in northeastern Madagascar has sat in a jar in Paris for half a century, and for most of that time it was a problem. It is the holotype of Rhombophryne…
Sequence a bacterium and you get a parts list with most of the labels missing. Streptococcus pneumoniae, the organism responsible for a great deal of pneumonia and meningitis, encodes a broad array…
Most parasites that end up inside a human cell get there by being swallowed. Toxoplasma gondii does not wait for the invitation. It sets its narrow end against the membrane of a cell and drives…
A mouse dies in the leaf litter of a northern European wood, and within a few hours a pair of burying beetles has found it. They work through the night. The two of them drag the body down into the…
Picture a kangaroo the weight of the biggest reds alive today, but built wrong for the part: too stocky, too muscular, and by most reckoning barely able to hop. Protemnodon tumbuna seems to have…
A museum drawer of songbird skeletons does not look like a story. It looks like a lot of small, pale, similar bones. Sparrows, finches, warblers, thrushes: the group biologists call Passeriformes…
Green tree ants are not the kind of prey most spiders go looking for. They swarm, they bite, they spray formic acid, and they coordinate. A spider that tried to wrestle one into a web would, more…
Watch a fruit fly hover over a bowl of ripe peaches, then a crane fly stumble across a windowpane, then a midge hang in a cloud at dusk. They look like utterly different aviators: different sizes,…
The first clue was almost nothing. In 2008, a photograph taken on the east bank of the Lomami River in the Democratic Republic of Congo showed a black monkey with a strange, bright detail: orange…
In the airless mud of a river near Libreville, in Gabon, a single cell keeps finding its way down. It is a ciliate: a fringe of beating hairs, a nucleus, the sort of organism a high-school microscope…
Open almost any biology textbook to the chapter on photosynthesis and you will meet the same diagram. Light hits a green cell and its energy runs down a chain built from two linked machines,…