Animals

A study published Aug. 19 in Science Advances places more than 5,800 animal genomes on a single map and reports that chromosomes rearrange along a limited set of routes that cannot be retraced,…

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…

The narwhal's corkscrew tusk is built from mineral-hardened collagen wound into two helices that turn in opposite directions, a team led from Aarhus University in Denmark reports in a paper published…

Deep in a maze of tunnels, a single female runs the whole operation. She is the only naked mole-rat in her colony who breeds. The dozens of other females around her, her daughters and sisters, live…

Watch a group of apes just before the food arrives, and you can feel the room tighten. Bananas or sugarcane are about to land in the middle of a hierarchy, and everyone knows it. In those loaded…

The find that matters here was not made in the field. It was made at a table, with a drawer of bones on it, in a collection nobody had worked through properly since the material came out of the…

In the Brazilian savanna a capuchin monkey climbs onto a flat block of stone with a palm nut in one hand. It sets the nut down, picks up a second stone, raises it above its head with both arms, and…

Pick up a jar labeled USDA organic honey in an American supermarket and the label is almost certainly describing a farm somewhere else. Brazil, Argentina, or one of a handful of apiaries in Hawaii.…

An international team of paleontologists has named a new dinosaur, Musango matusadonaensis, from a partial skeleton excavated in 2018 on the shoreline of Lake Kariba in northern Zimbabwe. The…

The lesions were the easy part. For more than a decade, biologists had watched brown bullhead catfish in Lake Memphremagog turn up with patches of blackened, malignant skin; by 2014, nearly one in…

An elephant standing still, its ears spread, sometimes seems to be listening to nothing at all. It isn't. It is listening to the ground. Elephants communicate across distances that would defeat…