As macabre as it seems, it’s not exactly a secret that in some species of shark the unborn dine on their siblings while still developing in the womb. But it turns out we don’t know the half of it. A new kind of ultrasound device has provided biologists with a detailed view of this common

Off the coast of southern Tasmania, Australia, in the submerged mountains of a protected marine park, scientists have turned up more than 100 unnamed species from the deep sea. Each of these creatures or corals is as fascinating and bizarre-looking as the next. There are lobsters with awkwardly long arms, worms with iridescent rings of

A white Christmas is not usually part of the Australian experience, but this holiday season, the weather outside has been frightful indeed. On what would’ve usually been a hot and sweaty December afternoon, Sydneysiders were instead entertained with a deluge of hard, icy rocks, cascading from the heavens in a variety of remarkable shapes and

The world’s caves are easily forgotten. Missing from most maps and hidden from the surface, these underground kingdoms are often cloaked by darkness and shrouded in mystery. They’re natural labyrinths that only the most adventurous dare to navigate. Crafted over many thousands of years into a maze of lava, limestone or ice, finding a way

The stomachs of other animals in the same suborder probably wouldn’t occur to most people as a place to find a new species, but that’s exactly where one has turned up. In the guts of a Central American coral snake (Micrurus nigrocinctus), herpetologists have found the remains of a snake unknown to science. That’s not

The late Cretaceous, which ended 66 million years ago, was a rough-and-tumble time. Dinosaurs like Ankylosaurus left reminders of brutishness in their fossilized armor. Spikes sprouted from their shoulders. Row after row of bony plates covered their backs. With low and well-protected bulks, tipping the scales at a ton or more, they were built like

When President Trump announced his plan to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement last year, he said he was benching the United States in the global fight against climate change because he wanted the rest of the world to stop “laughing at us.” “We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore,

Google Street View is a technological wonder that makes visiting almost anywhere on the planet (and off the planet) a virtual cinch. But it’s got some issues. Case in point: you might have seen a spooky story doing the rounds about a mysterious UFO floating above a Florida swamp “in broad daylight… just outside the

Coastal erosion is a slow force, but a powerful one, over millennia carving new shapes into the edges of land. And it can also reveal secrets hidden for millions of years – such as a new discovery on the coast of England. It’s a huge cache of 85 dinosaur footprints from the Lower Cretaceous, made

Historically, tornadoes have been thought to originate in the clouds, reaching turbulent fingers down to Earth. But now a team of climatologists has demonstrated that this ‘top-down’ model of tornadogenesis might actually be wrong. Yep. Tornadoes, their research has found, form from the ground up. Tornadoes can form surprisingly quickly, in just a couple minutes.

Australia is home to one of the world’s rarest meteorological phenomena, which most people have never heard of. Known as morning glory clouds, these long bands of cigar-shaped formations can stretch up to 1,000 kilometres (621 miles) in length. And they can only be seen reliably in one place in the world – Australia’s Gulf

Feathers found in Burmese amber dating back 100 million years are so exquisitely preserved that palaeontologists have been able to make a detailed study of their structure – and they’re like nothing seen in living birds today. In fact, they may have served as a type of decoy, falling away in a predator’s grasp, much

The largest diamond ever discovered in North America was unearthed in October, Canadian mining company Dominion Diamond Mines announced in a Thursday news release. Weighing in at 552 carats, the yellow diamond was recovered at the Diavik Diamond Mine, located in Northern Canada about 135 miles south of the Arctic Circle.  Bloomberg News reports that the

The slugs that we find in the garden are not the most inspiring creatures. They kind of just look like dark, slimy blobs. But deep under the sea, their relatives are quite the opposite. And one particular group of sea slugs, called the nudibranchs (pronounced “nood-i-branks”), are especially gaudy looking. These bizarre-looking creatures are covered

Shark populations off the east coast of Australia have been declining over the past 55 years with little sign of recovery, according to research published in the journal Communications Biology. Coastal shark numbers are continuing a 50-year decline, contradicting popular theories of exploding shark populations, according to an analysis of Queensland Shark Control Program data.

An invasive tick that feeds on humans, pets, livestock and wildlife is now making a new home for itself in the United States. The Asian longhorned tick (Haemaphysalis longicornis) is a potentially disease-carrying, blood-sucking species native to East Asia. Last year, however, this exotic pest was somehow found in the US state of New Jersey,

Evolution is a fascinating field but can be rife with misunderstanding. One misconception is that evolution has some innate sense of direction or purpose. In reality, evolution is a mindless, plan-free phenomenon, driven into endless possibilities by random mutations, the most successful of which win out. People also often think that every aspect of every

Back on 24 January 2017, Fiona the hippo was born 6 weeks early at the Cincinnati Zoo. Nowadays she’s a big, strong juvenile hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius), but it took a lot of love and caring to get her there – she’s the smallest hippo born in captivity to ever survive. Her birth weight was only

Deep under the ocean, in the dark, dark depths, marine scientists have discovered a new field of hydrothermal vents, hosting an ecosystem unlike any other – with a plethora of species that have never been seen before. It’s been named Jaich Maa, and it’s in the Pescadero Basin at the southern end of the Gulf

It’s something most of us can only ever dream of. You’re swimming in the ocean, minding your own business, when suddenly a family of sleek marine mammals materialises, joining you as you glide through the water. That’s what happened to not one, but two swimmers off the coast of New Zealand in recent weeks, as

Despite several warnings and some major red flags, the Australian government has allowed hundreds of rare and endangered birds to be sent to a zoo in Germany. The only problem is, some are not convinced that the destination is a real, legitimate zoo – at least, not one that the public can actually visit –

Even the tiniest organisms can make it to the big leagues. The number one fastest animal movement in the world now belongs to an ant no bigger than the tip of your finger. Ominously named the Dracula ant (Mystrium camillae), this minuscule species is shy and elusive, a subterranean predator that enjoys sucking the blood

Anyone who’s seen a gecko will likely know they can climb walls. But these common lizards can also run across water nearly as fast as they can move on solid ground. Yet while we know how geckos scale smooth vertical surfaces using countless tiny hairs on their feet called setae, how they manage to avoid

Earth is not the home you think it is. Far below the scant surface spaces we inhabit, the planet is teeming with an incredibly vast and deep ‘dark biosphere‘ of subterranean lifeforms that scientists are only just beginning to comprehend. Hidden throughout this subsurface realm, some of the world’s deepest and oldest organisms thrive in

The name says it all, really. With the exception of some orange hairs in the rear, the black mantled howler monkey (Alouatta palliata) is predominantly covered in – you guessed it – pitch black fur. This is true for all the black howler monkeys in the forests of Central America and the north of South

A relaxed-looking juvenile Hawaiian monk seal lounges near a sandy white beach on some green foliage. Its eyes are half-closed, and it has a serene expression on its face. But the seal’s calm demeanor is surprising. Why? Well, there’s a long, black-and-white eel dangling from its right nostril. “It’s just so shocking,” Claire Simeone, a

She squeaks in ultrasound, “I love you”. He chirrups back “Right back at ya’, sweetheart”. It’s all in the dulcet tones of California mice, but the meaning is clear. Then one of them spends time with another mouse spouse. Later, partners reunited, there’s tension. Somebody barks. A high pitched roar. They’ll make up later, but

Salamanders are, by their very nature, slippery creatures. Perhaps none so slippery as the mysterious ‘leopard eel’ – an amphibian spotted intermittently in the waters of Florida over the last few decades that somehow managed to elude scientific study. Until now, that is. Ecologist Sean Graham of Sul Ross State University in Texas and colleagues

We’re now increasingly aware of the microplastic fragments polluting our oceans, but a new study shows just how quickly these tiny particles can find their way into marine life – it takes a mere six hours for billions of pieces of material to spread inside aquatic animals. The unfortunate critters involved in the research were

You only wish you could be this fabulous millions of years after you die. Precious stones recovered from the opal fields of Australia have turned out not just to be opalised fossils – but the opalised fossils of a dinosaur previously unknown to palaeontology. It’s called Weewarrasaurus pobeni – named for the Wee Warra opal

Freezing temperatures and industrial activity may sound like a recipe for disaster, but sometimes, beautiful things come from strange places. In the frigid cold of winter, two industrial power plants on the outskirts of a small town in Nebraska have caused a rare and unusual weather event. For more than a day, residents living downwind

Jumping spiders are already among the most adorable members of the arachnid order, but we’re ready to give them the prize, officially. A species of ant-mimicking jumping spider has just been found suckling its babies on milk. You know what else does that? Kitties. Doggos. Mousies. But Toxeus magnus is much more diligent than mouse

If classic monster movies and old science experiments are to be believed, life begins with a spark. Not everybody is convinced by this kind of origin story, so the search continues for sources of energy capable of transforming a prebiotic soup into a life-generating dish. Maybe the secret ingredient isn’t anything more shocking than a

The outer layer of the Earth, the solid crust we walk on, is made up of broken pieces, much like the shell of a broken egg. These pieces, the tectonic plates, move around the planet at speeds of a few centimetres per year. Every so often they come together and combine into a supercontinent, which

This week, a Holstein by the name of Knickers captured the heart of the Internet by standing horns and shoulders above a herd of cattle on a farm in Australia. And there’s no arguing that the lad is large. At the shoulder, Knickers stands a mighty 6’4″ (193 centimetres), which means he’s two inches taller

In the land down under, sticking out in a crowd is rarely a good thing. Australians have a habit of cutting “tall poppies” down to size, frowning on those overachievers who are too big for their own boots. An exception has been made for Knickers the giant cow, long may he reign. Right now, Knickers is

Could nature’s smallest organisms help us to combat rising CO2 levels and even oil spills? Strange as it might seem, the answer might be yes, with research into newly discovered deep-sea microbes suggesting these tiny critters possess a keen appetite for pollutants. The microbes – collected in the Gulf of California, around 2,000 metres (6,562

Spider silk is well known as one of the strongest natural materials in existence, but now scientists have a better understanding of why – and it’s all to do with the old adage of strength in numbers. Through an atomic force microscope trained on the silk of a brown recluse spider (Loxosceles reclusa) – which essentially

Scientists have an imprecise understanding of the obscure phenomenon of mass whale strandings, when large numbers of the marine mammals suddenly beach themselves – often their final acts. There are, of course, many reasons a whale would find itself on a beach: illness or injury that leaves them at the mercy of ocean currents and

It didn’t look much like the dainty unicorns of myth and legend, but the extinct unicorn of Siberia is even more entrancing for palaeontologists. Now, for the first time, scientists have analysed its DNA – and realised everyone had been wrong about the mysterious beast. The ancient rhinoceros didn’t die off 200,000 years ago, before

Before the dinosaurs we’re mostly familiar with, there was a group of smaller ancestors that we know very little about. But now archaeologists have discovered three new well-preserved skeletons in Brazil, and it’s teaching us more about this particular branch of the dino family tree. The skeletons fit into a new dinosaur species that’s been

The willow warbler is not one to stop and smell the flowers. Weighing in at a mere 10 grams (3.5 ounces), this restless little songbird regularly traverses multiple continents, flying thousands of kilometres and taking remarkably few breaks. In fact, researchers in Sweden have now determined this epic trek by the Siberian willow warbler (Phylloscopus trochilus yakutensis) constitutes the

Penises come in many shapes and sizes in the animal kingdom. But usually they’re only ever found on the sperm-owner of a species.  In the strange case of a tribe of cave-dwelling winged insects found in Africa and Brazil though, it’s the egg-laying females who grow a phallus – albeit, not one that ejaculates sperm,

Some corners of the internet are in a bit of a tizzy after a Texas resident allegedly discovered a writhing, brain-like mass of worms in a puddle following several days of rainfall. According to Pen News Agency, which seems to supply content primarily to, ahem, British tabloids with a spotty track record when it comes

There’s a forest in Massachusetts that for nearly 30 years has hosted the world’s longest running soil-warming experiment, measuring how hotter temperatures impact the tiny life-forms that live in the dirt. With the way climate change is going, you could say the future itself is buried in that heated dirt. But our unknown tomorrows aren’t

A five-year long investigation into the criminal trade of tiger parts in Czechia culminated in the discovery of a horrific animal slaughterhouse in Prague, and shows illegal trafficking in big cats isn’t just a problem in Asia. Back in July, inspectors with the Czech Environmental Inspectorate (CEI) led over 200 police and customs officers in

A fisherman has shared a video of a surprise drawn up from the depths of the ocean. Included in the catch from a deep-sea trawling expedition was a sight most people never see in the wild: a wriggling worm that lives in the deep, dark ocean, where little light penetrates. The footage was shared on

The Australian wombat has one of nature’s most bizarre superpowers. This pudgy, bear-like marsupial is the only animal we know of that can produce cube-shaped poos. These unique droppings have long been a biological mystery, although biologists have partially attributed the shape to the incredible dryness of wombat poop. But now we have a new