Scientists think they’ve filled an important gap in whale evolution – the fossilised remains of a specimen that lived around 36.4 million years ago, and is thought to be one of the first whales to use large, sieve-like combs called baleen instead of teeth to filter their food. Today, baleen whales (or mysticeti) are among the

Drone footage has captured something no one’s ever seen before – wild narwhals using their bizarre tusks to hunt Arctic cod by hitting and stunning them, making them easier to consume. The behaviour addresses a biological mystery that’s spanned decades – why these rare and elusive whales have evolved an extra-long left canine tooth that

Before being assembled into something recognisable at a museum, most dinosaur fossils look to the casual observer like nothing more than common rocks. No one, however, would confuse the over 110 million-year-old nodosaur fossil for a stone. The fossil, being unveiled today in Canada’s Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, is so well preserved it looks like

A dead unknown sea animal has been found washed up on an island in Indonesia. The bloodied creature lay in shallow waters on the shores of Seram Island. Local man Asrul Tuanakota made the discovery on Tuesday evening.   It is thought to be 15 metres long and 6 to 7 metres wide. While local media

Biology is really one big horror story. You don’t need to look much further than the various types of parasites that drive their hosts into the mouths of hungry predators. If you’re keeping track of these tiny monsters, you should know that there’s a species of flatworm that parks itself inside the eyeball of a

Hey, kids: Science can be sexy – super sexy. Just ask Dara Orbach, who has spent seven years studying dolphin vaginas, and her colleagues Patricia Brennan and Diane Kelly, who are some of the foremost experts on animal penises. They recently combined forces to solve the mystery of just how dolphins and other cetaceans do the deed, a task that

From a single species of plant comes many teas. The tea tree, a shrub called Camellia sinensis, produces white, green, black and oolong teas. The tea’s destiny is a matter of variables. The final drink reflects the tea cultivar, the growing environment and how the leaves are processed – dried, crushed, steamed, blended. Farmers pluck

Back in 2011, scientists discovered the world’s only known example of a vertebrate cell hosting the cells of a completely different species in an act of symbiosis between a salamander and a species of algae. While similar relationships can be found in animals without a backbone, such as coral and molluscs, this unusual discovery posed

As complex as the human brain is, it more or less has the same fundamental structure as most other backboned animals – which means it can be divided into three general regions: forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain. Researchers have long thought that these three sections all evolved from three simpler versions in our vertebrate ancestors. But a new map of