Biology

A fossil from the Middle Jurassic of China has been described with its throat intact: the bony roof of the passage and the small bones that sit inside it, parts that almost never survive in an animal…

Stanford University researchers report that the Tsimane of Bolivia and the Hadza of Tanzania, two Indigenous peoples living on different continents, share 1,231 species of gut bacteria. Genetic…

The animal is 322 millimeters long, dried to a yellow-beige, and it has sat in a cabinet in southern Germany since the late 1980s. For most of that time it carried a name: Bathynomus giganteus, the…

In the peat swamp forest at Tuanan, on the Indonesian side of Borneo, two infant orangutans catch sight of each other across a gap in the canopy and the day changes shape. They rush together,…

Two slabs of rock, one from southern China and one from southern Mongolia, look much the same under a microscope. Both are crowded with the preserved shapes of tiny organisms. In neither can anyone…

The MitoCarta Tree of Life Consortium has compared the proteins found inside mitochondria, the compartments that supply most of a cell's energy, in eight organisms drawn from across the tree of life.…

Researchers reported Oct. 1 in Scientific Reports that the situation a group of elephants is in can be worked out from the sound of several of them rumbling over one another, not only from calls made…

A fossil named in 1990 as the earliest known reptile is not a reptile at all. Writing in Nature on September 30, 2026, Ben Igielman of the University of Oxford, Roger Benson of the American Museum of…

Researchers have filmed living Asgard archaea, single-celled microbes without a nucleus that are considered the closest known relatives of complex cells, crawling across a glass surface. The work was…

Ask a biologist to sketch the bacteria that swim along magnetic field lines and you will get much the same drawing every time: a cell with a neat row of tiny bar magnets inside it, lined up nose to…

Touch the tentacle of a sea anemone and something explosive happens at a scale too small to see. Inside a stinging cell, a coiled thread fires outward, turns itself inside out, and harpoons whatever…

More than a decade after it was found, an antibody called CR9114 is still the only one known to block both influenza A and influenza B. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign say…