When the famous Chicxulub asteroid struck what is now Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula 66 million years ago, it ended the reign of the nonavian dinosaurs. As ecosystems recovered, small, adaptable mammals rapidly spread into newly vacant niches, evolving new diets, larger bodies and more diverse ways of life until they dominated the land within a few million years.

Now, new evidence suggests that even before the asteroid hit, Earth was already beginning to rot.

A study published May 12 in the journal PNAS found evidence of environmental fungal blooms before and after the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction event. Looking at microscopic fossils from rocks dating to the K-Pg event in North America, a team of researchers led by Dr. Arturo Casadevall, chair of the Molecular Microbiology and Immunology Department at Johns Hopkins University, identified an earlier fungal bloom dating to roughly 30,000 to 100,000 years before the asteroid hit, during a period of cooling linked to intense volcanic activity in the Deccan Traps in what is now India.

The researchers also found a fungal spike immediately after the Chicxulub impact exactly when dead plants and animals would have littered devastated ecosystems. The finding adds to earlier evidence from New Zealand that suggests the fungal bloom wasn't just a local event.

This idea feeds into a controversial idea called the fungal infection-mammalian selection (FIMS) hypothesis. First proposed two decades ago by Casadevall and subsequently updated in 2018 and 2026 papers, the FIMS hypothesis suggests that the abundance of fungus before the asteroid impact may have helped mammals gain an evolutionary advantage over the dinosaurs that remained after that cataclysm.

The hypothesis doesn't argue that fungus wiped out the dinosaurs. Instead, it proposes that mammals' live births and immune systems may have helped them withstand the rise of fungus in ways egg-laying reptiles and nonavian dinosaurs could not, thereby giving them the upper hand in disrupted ecosystems full of rot, cold, starvation and polluted air.

"The fungal infection mammalian selection hypothesis is focused on how the mammals became the dominant land animals," Casadevall told Live Science via email, "not dinosaur extinction."

But not all experts are convinced. Mary O'Connell, the Chair of the Zoology department at the University of Manchester told Live Science via email that the hypothesis doesn't fit all the evidence and that "it emerges from a chain of plausibility arguments rather than direct evidence, and the links in the chain are weaker than the framing may suggest."

A fungal world before the asteroid

To find this pre-asteroid fungal bloom in their new study, Casadevall and Rosanna Baker, who researches fungus at Johns Hopkins, focused on palynomorphs — tiny fossilized organic remains, including fungal spores, fungal hyphae and plant pollen — preserved in ancient sediment layers from the Denver Basin in Colorado dating back to the K-Pg extinction.

Baker counted between 100 and 500 microfossils per sample across sediment layers spanning about 60,000 years before the K-Pg mass extinction event to 30,000 years after it. Most samples were dominated by plant material, but some layers contained 50% or more fungal spores. The researchers interpreted this high proportion of fungal spores as a sign of ecological disturbance ‪—‬ more dead material and more fungi feeding on it, especially after the dinosaur-killing asteroid.

Baker and Casadevall also found an earlier fungal bloom dating to roughly 10,000 to 30,000 years before the asteroid impact.

"What surprised us was the proliferation in association with Deccan volcanism, which implies ecological disruption prior to [the] meteor impact," Casadevall told Live Science via email.

In other words, ecosystems may have already been under stress — and faced with a fungal overgrowth — before the asteroid delivered the final blow.

The case for FIMS

When Casadevall first proposed the FIMS hypothesis, it rested on a simple observation: Mammals are unusually resistant to invasive fungal diseases.

Fungi are major pathogens of plants, insects, amphibians and many reptiles, but life-threatening systemic fungal infections are relatively rare in mammals with healthy immune systems. Casadevall argued that mammals' relative resistance to fungi came from their sophisticated immune systems. In mammals, first-line, relatively nonspecific defenses such as neutrophils recognize fungal cell walls, engulf spores and attack invasive filaments, while the adaptive arm of the immune system excels at building customized antibodies that selectively target specific fungi, and then creating immune memory so the invaders are recognized the next time they're encountered.

Casadevall also initially believed that mammals' high, stable body temperatures — generally around 97 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit (36 to 40 degrees Celsius) — could prevent many environmental fungi from growing well enough to establish an infection.

"The success of mammals made no sense given their high energy needs and this idea provided a plausible mechanism for their success," Casadevall said.

After the asteroid hit, forests burned, plants died, darkness fell and dead matter piled up, providing a feast for fungi. If fungal spores filled the air, surviving animals may have inhaled enormous, possibly dangerous doses.

However, the FIMS hypothesis proposes that mammals had several possible adaptations against these fungal invaders that other animals did not. In addition to having warm body temperatures and complex immune systems, mammals who could maintain stable body temperatures could forage during the cold "impact winter," ‪when ash and dust blocked out the light of the sun. Meanwhile the dinosaurs, who were originally thought to be the "cold-blooded," would have struggled to stay active and find food, leading them to become weaker and more susceptible to disease.

Differences in gestation may have mattered, too. Many mammals protect developing embryos inside the mother's body, where warmth and immunity could shield them from fungi. In contrast, all dinosaurs laid eggs. Those eggs developed in nests, which were often in contact with soil and decaying plant matter ‪—‬ the exact environments where fungi thrive. Modern fungi can invade reptile eggs, and fossilized hyphae, a type of fungus, was described in dinosaur eggshells in a 2008 study.

That does not prove fungi wiped out dinosaur nests. Fossilized hyphae could suggest either that fungi invaded a living egg, or that fungi colonized the egg after death. Still, eggshells provide one clue that fungi were a problem for the survival of dinosaur young..

A sick sauropod

Another potential line of evidence to buttress the FIMS hypothesis came from dinosaur bones that showed evidence of fungal infection.

In 2022, a team led by Cary Woodruff, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science in Miami, described a Late Jurassic sauropod fossil from Montana with unusual lesions in its neck vertebrae. The dinosaur, an immature diplodocine known as MOR 7029, lived roughly 150 million years ago, long before the asteroid impact.

Sauropods had long, air-filled neck bones connected to their respiratory system. In fossils of healthy sauropods, the places where air-sac tissue met bone are smooth, sometimes glass-like, Woodruff told Live Science.

But in this animal, the normally smooth sockets were rough and irregular. "Coming out of the socket — like imagine coming out towards you —it looked like fossilized heads of broccoli florets," Woodruff said. "And I had never seen that."

Unsure what he was looking at, Woodruff posted a photo online and asked whether anyone had seen anything similar. Other anatomists and paleontologists quickly weighed in. Their response, he recalled, was essentially, "That's exactly what we would have predicted a respiratory infection to look like," he said.

By comparing the fossil lesions with respiratory diseases in modern birds, which are living dinosaurs, the team tentatively flagged the condition as airsacculitis with associated osteomyelitis ‪—‬ air-sac inflammation that had spread to nearby bone.

However, the researchers could not identify the exact disease that caused the inflammation. In modern birds, airsacculitis can be caused by fungal infections such as aspergillosis, but also by bacterial infections. Without preserved soft tissue or fungal structures, they stopped short of confirming a fungal infection diagnosis.

Either way, Woodruff thinks the sauropod was probably sick enough that the infection contributed to its death. It may have become too weak to keep up, too ill to eat or drink properly, or too vulnerable to escape predators.

The case against FIMS

Even so, many experts remain skeptical of Casadevall's hypothesis. For one thing, the asteroid and its aftermath already explain a tremendous amount. The impact triggered tsunamis, earthquakes and a global food-web collapse. Those disasters alone would have killed off large dinosaurs at the top of disrupted food chains.

Another problem revolves around body temperature. In 2005, when Casadevall first proposed his hypothesis, dinosaurs were often thought of as "cold-blooded," while mammals were "warm-blooded." But over the years, research has uncovered that many nonavian dinosaurs, such as Velociraptor, T. rex and Brachiosaurus, were likely warm-blooded, too ‪—‬ so body temperature wouldn't explain why fungus would have been a big problem for many dinosaurs.

Complicating the picture, birds — the only surviving dinosaurs — often have higher body temperatures than mammals do. So the FIMS theory rests on an assumption that living examples of dinosaurs don't support, Flynn said.

Around the time of the asteroid impact, cold-blooded creatures like turtles and crocodilians that lived in the water "don't really suffer as severely as other groups, even including mammals," Andrew Flynn, an assistant professor of paleobotany at New Mexico State University, told Live Science. "Clearly this fungal thing is not probably what's causing mammals to rise up and go on to dominate the ecosystem."

The FIMS hypothesis also has a contradiction at its heart, said Jingmai O'Connor, a paleontologist at the Field Museum in Chicago.

"It's just a hypothesis I had vaguely heard about but was not popular, not often mentioned, and I guess I would say 'out of favor,'" O'Connor told Live Science via email. "If everything we know that suggests dinosaurs are more susceptible to fungal infections is based on living dinosaurs (birds) and they survived, doesn't that rather undermine this hypothesis?"

Dr. Isabel Jimenez, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University and a proponent of FIMS, agrees that this discrepancy must be explained.

"For the FIMS hypothesis to still hold water, we have to consider alternative mechanisms by which dinosaurs could have been more susceptible to fungal diseases than mammals," Jimenez told Live Science in an email.

Modern-day birds are avian theropods — the surviving branch of the dinosaur family tree — and likely faced the same fungal pressures as their extinct relatives. More recently, in 2026, Jimenez and Casadevall have suggested a tweak to their theory: that some of the small-bodied, beaked, flying or semiflying theropods may have been able to pull through, despite some baseline higher susceptibility to fungal disease. That's because they were small, had feathers to better insulate their bodies, and maintained generalist diets that enabled them to use more food sources than the dinosaur lineages that died out.

Working with Jimenez, Casadevall outlined an updated version of the FIMS hypothesis in a paper published earlier this year. In it, they propose that dinosaurs' respiratory systems may have made them more at risk than their mammalian counterparts.

Whereas mammals breathe by expanding and contracting flexible lungs filled with blood-rich alveoli, modern birds — and probably many dinosaurs — have rigid lungs ventilated by a network of thin-walled air sacs. The air sacs act as bellows, maintaining one-way airflow through the lungs, but they perform little gas exchange and have relatively poor blood supply. This system could have also carried inhaled fungal spores deep into the respiratory tract, where they may have settled in air sacs that are harder for circulating immune cells to reach and clear.

While birds have a similar sophisticated immune system as mammals — including macrophages and antibodies — their air sacs extend throughout the body and sometimes into the bones, making fungal infections easier to spread beyond just the respiratory system.

This possible weakness is what Jimenez and Casadevall suggest is what made air-sac-bearing dinosaurs vulnerable to fungal infections, similar to modern birds.

After the asteroid strike, there would have been soot and sulfur polluting the air and dinosaurs would have been nutritionally stressed. "So secondary fungal infections are certainly possible," Jimenez said, referring to infections that take root after the body's defenses are weakened.

But skeptics argue that even with these updates in the FIMS hypothesis, more evidence is needed to show it's not just possible but likely.

The idea that their air-sac respiratory systems made them more vulnerable to fungus is "a more testable claim," but its likely impact on dinosaurs would also be more limited, because of competing environmental factors, O'Connell said.

And because only a handful of fungal species actually cause disease in animals, to show that fungi worsened dinosaur deaths, researchers would need to find evidence of elevated fungal disease in dinosaur fossils from right after the asteroid struck, O'Connell said.

"We would also need to be able to identify elevation of pathogenic fungal spores in the sedimentary record at that boundary, rather than just more spores," she said.

Overall, "the fungal infection-mammalian selection hypothesis feels like a conjecture in search of any supporting evidence," paleontologist and science writer Riley Black, told Live Science in an email.

How much do you know about the king of the dinosaurs? Test your knowledge with our T. rex quiz!

Happy Shark Week, science fans! To mark the occasion, we had a flurry of fishy features this week, including a first look at the secret lives of whale sharks, as seen from cameras on the animals' fins, and the discovery of a "demon cavefish" beneath a World War II chemical weapons facility in Alabama.

This week, we also saw the first drone footage of the birth of a humpback whale.

Meanwhile, off the coast of Spain, the orcas are at it again, sinking yet another ship along the Iberian coast. And speaking of boats, as cargo ships continue to stall near the Strait of Hormuz, scientists have warned of an imminent biological "superspreader" event once the key shipping route reopens.

We also have an update of our own: Live Science has launched Live Science Pro, a paid membership that gives you access to our exclusive features, analyses, interviews, book excerpts and opinion pieces, all without ads And to celebrate, we're offering an introductory price of only $3 for the first three months! You can subscribe here.

Earth registers coldest temperature

Antarctica just experienced minus 119 F, Earth's coldest temperature since 2012 — here's why

While the Northern Hemisphere battled heat waves and wildfires, Antarctica just experienced the lowest temperature recorded on Earth in over a decade. High-altitude research station Concordia, located in the icy continent's interior, logged a low of minus 119.4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 84.1 degrees Celsius) on July 18, just shy of the coldest temperature ever recorded at the station.

"Even here, where extreme cold is expected, temperatures below minus 84 C are remarkable and highlight how variable Antarctic weather can still be," Gabriele Carugati, the station leader at Concordia for Italy's National Antarctic Research Program, told Live Science from the station.

Discover more planet Earth news

—Magnitude 6.8 earthquake traps shoppers as mall collapses in Japan —‬ here's why the seismic event was unusual

—Colossal scars of 60 million-year-long continental collision streak across warped mountains in Pakistan — Earth from space

—Mice on 'godforsaken' frozen volcanoes eat toxic plants to survive conditions 'not remotely compatible with long-term human survival'

Life's Little Mysteries

Why do cats have 'leg whiskers'?

Cats are known for having whiskers on their faces. But if you look closely, you'll see they also have them on their legs. So what are these leg whiskers for? And how do they differ from the ones on their face?

—If you enjoyed this, sign up for our Life's Little Mysteries newsletter

Geoglyphs from lost Amazonian civilization

Lasers reveal hundreds of geoglyphs made by a mysterious civilization in the Amazon rainforest thousands of years ago

A significant portion of the Amazon rainforest remains unexplored, and even from above, it's almost impossible to see through the trees' thick canopies to find out what lies beneath. However, thanks to modern laser scanning technology, scientists have peered through this wall of leaves ‪—‬ and what they've found may offer new insight into lost human civilizations.

A new lidar survey has revealed hundreds of earthworks made by the Aquiry people, who arose 2,500 years ago in Brazil. So what can these structures teach us about this mysterious lost civilization?

Discover more archaeology news

—Relief fragment with vanquished enemies: A 3,400-year-old depiction of an Egyptian pharaoh crushing western Asian soldiers under his royal chariot

—Ancient human relative cannibalized both adults and children in a cave in Spain 850,000 years ago, fossils reveal

—Archaeologists find 2,800-year-old burial of person clutching sea turtle vessel in El Salvador

Also in science news this week

—A unique antibody system may help explain bats' unusual tolerance of viruses

—Scientists may have found a clue to prevent muscles from aging, study hints

—'Feynman and followers, you guys are off': Physicists disprove decades-old Richard Feynman theory on 'silly' sprinklers

—A strange string of a dozen galaxies keeps surprising astronomers with its missing dark matter

—Scientists discover 2 new 'ghost' lineages that contributed DNA to modern humans

Science Spotlight

Inflammation may trigger persistent 'out-of-body' experiences, emerging research hints

We're increasingly learning about the role of chronic inflammation in a range of diseases, from autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. However, scientists may have now added a new surprising side effect to this immune response: "out-of-body" experiences.

It's been known for a while that trauma can trigger altered states of consciousness, but exactly what was causing this psychiatric response was unclear. Now, scientists have found that stress triggered by trauma may dial up chronic inflammation, which could, in turn, trigger these dissociative disorders.

Something for the weekend

If you're looking for things to keep you busy over the weekend, here's a selection from our best interviews, explainers, skywatching guides and crosswords that we published this week.

—America's gun violence epidemic, through the eyes of a Chicago trauma surgeon [Interview]

—'World models' are the future of AI, but how do they work? [Explainer]

—Which solar eclipse viewing method is right for you? [Skywatching]

—Live Science crossword puzzle #54: Egyptian pharaoh who died at 18 — 6 down [Crossword]

Science in motion

Chinese rocket hit by rare midair lightning strike moments after launch as onlookers gasp in horror

It's like something from a movie: Seconds after China's Long March 3B rocket launched on July 23, the spacecraft was struck by lightning. Hundreds of spectators watched in shock as at least 100 million volts of electricity hit the craft and surged around its fuselage and through its exhaust plume, before shooting down to Earth.

Despite the strike, the uncrewed rocket safely reached space and successfully deployed its payload into orbit.

Follow Live Science on social media

Want more science news? Follow our Live Science WhatsApp Channel for the latest discoveries as they happen. It's the best way to get our expert reporting on the go, but if you don't use WhatsApp we're also on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Flipboard, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky and LinkedIn.

Cats are known for the whiskers on their faces. However, if you look closely, you can see that they also have whiskers on their legs. So why do cats have leg whiskers?

To answer why they're useful, it's important to understand what whiskers are. Technically known as vibrissae, whiskers are specialized hairs that are stiffer and several times thicker than other hairs. Although whiskers themselves do not contain nerves, their bases are rooted in specialized receptacles loaded with nerve endings, making whiskers very sensitive.

"Facial whiskers are as sensitive as human fingertips," Robyn Grant, a sensory biologist at Manchester Metropolitan University in the U.K., told Live Science.

A cat's whiskers around the nose, which are also known as the mystacial vibrissae, are the longest whiskers they have, according to the veterinary reference book "The Feline Patient" (Wiley, 2025). Although there is variation among cats, on average there are 12 mystacial whiskers set in four rows on each side of the muzzle.

Facial whiskers help cats hunt when light is limited or when their vision is poor. Although cats are good at seeing distant objects, "cats can't really focus on anything less than 10 inches (25 centimeters) from their eyes, so they use their whiskers to figure out where things are," Jonathan Losos, an evolutionary biologist at Washington University in St. Louis and author of "The Cat's Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa" (Viking, 2023), told Live Science.

In addition, cats have a tuft of whiskers known as superciliary vibrissae above each eye. These whiskers help protect the cat's vision by triggering a blink when stimulated by anything that might fly into their eye, according to The Feline Patient.

Cats also have chin whiskers (mandibular vibrissae) and whiskers on each side of the head, between the ear and chin (genal vibrissae). These also help cats stay aware of the space around them.

Leg whiskers

Cats also possess a tuft of four to six whiskers on the back of each front leg, each about 0.8 to 1.2 inches (2 to 3 centimeters) long. These are known as carpal vibrissae.

"Carpal refers to the bones that, in humans, are in our wrists," Losos said. "Carpal whiskers are attached to cat forelegs near the carpal bones." However, in cats, the carpal bones are not located in the same place as the human wrist. Rather, they "are further up the leg, because cats essentially walk on their toes and not their palms," he explained.

Cats are not the only animals with carpal whiskers. "Most carnivores have them, and many rodents do, as do lemurs and armadillos," Losos said. "Dogs don't have them, but other canine species do. Rabbits don't have them either, nor do ungulates — that is, hooved animals, such as horses and cattle."

The species that have carpal whiskers "tend to be the ones that either grasp things with their forelimbs or climb up trees," Losos said. "The idea is that if it's hard for the animals to see what they're grasping, carpal whiskers can help supplement their vision. Perhaps cats have them and dogs don't because cats can move their forearms laterally from side to side and put their palms together to grab things, whereas dogs can't."

It remains uncertain what role carpal whiskers play in cats, but they likely "guide locomotion — that is, safe forepaw placement — especially during complex locomotion, such as climbing," Grant said. "They might guide prey handling too."

How much of a cat fan are you? Find out by taking our cat quiz!

Surfer, spear-fisher and free-diver Riley Elliott and marine biologist, shark diver and underwater photographer Kori Burkhardt put themselves in harm's way in don't-try-this-at-home "Shark Week" 2026 special "Secrets of the Great White Kill", and Live Science is here with all the TV and streaming details.

It doesn't always go to plan, as this seal uprising and vengeful turtle demonstrate, but great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) are known for attacking prey from below with such frightening speed and power it can propel their enormous bodies clear out of the water and stun or even kill their prey upon impact.

However, closer inspection has revealed that they can be a little more subtle when the need arises

In "Secrets of the Great White Kill," Eliott and Burkhardt aim to capture and unpack the full range of great white hunting techniques, including one or two surprising methods, the nuances of which have never been fully appreciated before.

How to watch "Secrets of the Great White Kill" in the U.S.

"Secrets of the Great White Kill" airs on Discovery at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Friday, July 31.

If you don't have the Discovery channel on cable, it's available on a streaming basis from several cable alternatives. Best of all, many of the services offer a free trial to new customers.

YouTube TV usually costs $82.99 per month but comes with a free trial and $15 off each of your first five months.

The DirecTV MyEntertainment genre pack costs $42.99 per month after a 5-day free trial, and Hulu + Live TV costs $89.99 per month after a 3-day free trial.

Alternatively, the HBO Max streaming service starts at $10.99 per month.

Can you watch "Secrets of the Great White Kill" in the U.K.?

"Shark Week" programming typically airs on Discovery+ in the U.K. at a later date.

At the time of publication, plans for "Secrets of the Great White Kill" and the other 2026 specials are still firmly under wraps.

If you're currently in the U.K. for work or on vacation from the U.S., you can still catch "Secrets of the Great White Kill" by using a VPN, such as Surfshark.

Watch "Secrets of the Great White Kill" from anywhere

If you're travelling abroad you can access your usual streaming services from anywhere with a good VPN.

A VPN, or virtual private network, is a piece of internet security software that can alter your device's digital location, unlocking the geo-restrictions on most streaming platforms.

Our expert colleagues at TechRadar rate Surfshark as one of the best VPNs. Not only is it great for unblocking streaming services, it has top-level security features, a reasonable price tag and, right now, a big discount.

We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example: 1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service). 2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad. We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.

Whale sharks may be the biggest fish in the ocean, but their feeding habits have remained mysterious. Now, new camera footage from the backs of these gentle giants has captured them doing something scientists rarely get to see: hunting for food far below the surface.

The footage reveals that whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) spend far more time feeding underwater than scientists realized and that they use a surprising variety of foraging techniques that had never been documented before.

The videos show whale sharks filtering food while cruising through open water, gliding downward as they feed during dives, climbing back toward the surface with their mouths still open, and cruising just above the seafloor to feed. Slow, steady underwater feeding turned out to be one of the sharks' most common activities.

Philip Motta, a professor emeritus of biology at the University of South Florida who was not involved in the study, said the videos provide "very valuable" new information on the variability of whale shark feeding behaviors, which have been poorly documented to date.

Cameras reveal whale shark feeding

Before this study, whale sharks had been studied from boats, from planes and by divers swimming alongside them. But those methods shared a blind spot: They could only follow the sharks when they were near the surface.

Earlier research had hinted that whale sharks spend a lot of time feeding out of view, at varying depths. In a 2020 study, researchers estimated that whale sharks may forage at these depths for up to 20% of the day and feed at the surface for less than 1% of their time.

In the new study, scientists strapped cameras directly onto the whale sharks, offering a rare shark's-eye view beneath the waves.

They deployed camera tags on 10 whale sharks at Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia and gathered more than 22 hours of footage from the sharks' own perspective. They combined that footage with a review of 106 previously published studies to build the most comprehensive catalog of whale shark behavior to date. Ultimately, they cataloged 36 distinct behaviors ‪—‬ 12 were related to feeding, and of those, six had never been recorded before. The findings were published July 21 in the journal Marine Biology.

Whale sharks can grow to 60 feet (18 meters) in length. And yet, this enormous fish survives on tiny prey ‪—‬ like krill, fish eggs and plankton ‪—‬ in tropical waters that are notoriously poor in nutrients. The ability to switch between so many feeding techniques may help to explain the long-standing puzzle of how such a large species can survive in these nutrient-poor waters.

However, even with a shark's-eye view, the cameras captured only part of the story. Whale sharks are known to dive hundreds of feet below the surface, where sunlight disappears and conventional cameras can no longer record.

"The most important new discoveries could be what these gentle giants are doing when they perform really deep dives," Motta said.

Shark quiz: How much do you know about these iconic ocean superstars?

Science word of the day: Coprolite

Pronunciation: KAHP'-ruh-lite

What it means: Coprolites are fossilized poop. Scientists have found coprolites from animals as diverse as fish, dinosaurs and saber-toothed cats. Teeth in the saber-toothed cat poop indicated that it had been eating baby sloths, which frankly feels a bit unfair from a creature with 11-inch-long (28 centimeters) teeth.

These fossils form when poop gets rapidly buried and mineralized instead of rotting away. Coprolites can be hard to match to the animal that produced them, but undigested bones and teeth in the fossilized poop can often provide clues to the kinds of animals that other animals eat.

How to use it in a sentence: If you're ever in a science museum and a volunteer, with a twinkle in their eye, asks you what you think a chunky, rock-looking thing is, the answer is always coprolite.

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word?

Monkeys use some of the same basic mental strategies as people do to perceive abstract relationships between shapes, a new study suggests.

The findings challenge the idea that humans crossed a sharp evolutionary divide when they learned to recognize geometric properties like symmetry, parallel lines and right angles, the researchers say.

"While humans do come up with geometric descriptions that are more abstract than what nonhumans can do, there's still some overlap, some similarity in the kinds of geometric intuitions you see in humans and those of non-primates," study co-author Jessica Cantlon, a professor of developmental neuroscience and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, told Live Science. "So there's a thread of continuity that runs through geometric reasoning between humans and nonhumans."

The research, published July 20 in the journal PNAS, adds to a long-standing scientific debate over whether humans possess entirely unique forms of abstract thought or unusually sophisticated versions of abilities found elsewhere in the animal kingdom.

"For decades, cognitive scientists have searched for the 'special ingredient' that distinguishes human intelligence from that of other animals," Elizabeth Brannon, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email. "This study provides compelling evidence that, at least for geometric reasoning, the difference between humans and other primates is more quantitative than qualitative."

In other words, the study suggested that baboons and macaques don't lack the ability to reason about geometry. Instead, they just aren't as proficient at it as humans, meaning that humans didn't evolve a new unique skill in understanding geometry.

A geometric matching game

The researchers tested eight adult monkeys: four rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) and four olive baboons (Papio anubis). The olive baboons participated through the Primate Portal, a touch-screen system installed at Seneca Park Zoo in Rochester, New York. One baboon, Kalamata, was especially enthusiastic.

"Every day he came to the touch screen," Jialin Li, a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University and first author of the study, told Live Science. "He just sat there and worked for two hours, three hours straight, completing thousands of trials. That's just amazing."

The macaques participated separately at Carnegie Mellon University, having prior experience with matching tests in other experiments.

The researchers then compared the animals' performance with that of 58 U.S. preschoolers ages 3 to 6, and 79 adults from the Tsimané, an Indigenous farmer-forager society in Bolivia whose members received little formal education. A separate experiment in the larger project involving rotating shapes also included 21 U.S. adults.

In all of the study's cohorts, the participants played a game known as a match-to-sample task.

"[The participants] see a sample shape first," Li said. "For example, it's a square. Then they need to tap the square to make sure that they are looking at it. When they tap it, there will be two shape choices that come up: one on the left and one on the right. They need to choose which shape matches with the sample shape."

The researchers made the choice shapes half the area of the sample shape, thus preventing the participants from solving the task by simply matching overall size or pixel count. In another version of the test, they rotated the choice shapes, thereby forcing the participants to identify the underlying form despite its changed orientation.

Correct answers earned the monkeys fruit-flavored cereal pellets, preschoolers collected stickers that could later be exchanged for prizes, and adults received verbal feedback. Incorrect answers triggered a "bonk" sound and a short timeout from the game.

Despite their limited formal education, the adult group had little trouble with the game, but the monkeys and the children had to put considerable thought into their choices.

"We often think that this matching task will be super easy for humans," Li said. "But actually, young kids were struggling in completing the task in telling the shapes apart, which makes them more similar to monkeys."

Ultimately, the children and monkeys could find the matches, Cantlon said, but only after taking a long time to think about the problem.

The researchers then used computer models to investigate which visual properties best predicted participants' decisions. One model represented simple details, such as edges and lines. Another represented more complex information about a shape's overall form. A third encoded discrete geometric properties, such as equal sides, equal angles, symmetry and parallelism — an approach the researchers described as "symbolic."

According to Cantlon and Li, the term "symbolic" does not mean the monkeys were mentally applying rules such as "a square has four equal sides." Much of the apparent symbolic effect could be explained by the ability to recognize a shape regardless of its orientation, known as rotation invariance.

If abstract geometry depended on a uniquely human symbolic system, only the human participants would have shown evidence of using that thought process. Instead, both monkeys and humans appeared to rely on a mixture of complex visual information and symbolic-like features. Adult humans generally performed the best, followed by preschoolers and monkeys, but their results overlapped. This finding suggests that the differences were quantitative, meaning humans are simply better at the same underlying kind of geometric reasoning rather than possessing an entirely unique ability., Monkeys relied roughly three times more strongly on the symbolic model when the shapes were rotated than when they remained upright.

Brandon said one of the study's most intriguing findings is that what looks like uniquely human symbolic reasoning for understanding geometry may actually grow out of flexible, abstract ways of representing information that are shared by humans and other primates.

Ancient roots of geometry

The results do not mean that monkeys understand formal mathematics, Brannon cautioned. "Human mathematical reasoning extends far beyond recognizing geometric regularities — it includes language, formal proof, recursive reasoning and cultural transmission."

Rather, this study provides evidence that some of the building blocks of mathematical thought have deeper evolutionary roots than previously recognized, she said.

Giorgio Vallortigara, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Trento in Italy who was not involved in the study, agrees with Brannon and her colleagues' conclusions.

Vallortigara explained in an email to Live Science that previous studies have often focused on how animals understand the geometry of their surroundings, such as navigating spaces. What makes these findings different is that they show animals can also reason about the geometric properties of individual objects.

Comparing species can help scientists trace the origins of geometry before language or arbitrary symbols became involved, Vallortigara said. It may also reveal whether similar abilities depend on mechanisms inherited from a common ancestor or evolved independently in animals with different nervous systems.

Li and Cantlon are now breaking down shapes into components such as angles, side lengths and numbers of sides to identify which properties are the hardest for monkeys and humans to understand. Cantlon described the follow-up as "a deconstructed geometry task."

The research could also help educators understand the geometric intuitions children bring into the classroom, Cantlon said, allowing lessons to build upon those abilities rather than treating geometry as something learned entirely from scratch.

"Evolution rarely invents entirely new mechanisms from scratch," Brannon said. "More often, it refines, recombines and extends existing ones."

What do you know about chimpanzees and great apes? Test your smarts with our primate quiz!

"Expedition X: Atomic Sharks" – a "Shark Week" 2026 special – sees biologist Phil Torres and "Expedition X" host Heather Amaro explore the islands' waters, including Troy's Coral Head, to establish if nuclear fallout could be behind reports of sharks displaying unusual and highly aggressive behaviors.

The U.S. military detonated 67 nuclear bombs at Bikini Atoll and Enewetak Atoll over 12 years from 1946 to 1958, which inflicted catastrophic and irreversible harm on the local populace and environment. Cancer rates among residents increased significantly, and local produce was rendered unfit for consumption.

Half a century later, however, the Marshall Islands became the site of the world's largest shark sanctuary.

How to watch "Expedition X: Atomic Sharks" in the U.S.

"Expedition X: Atomic Sharks" airs on Discovery at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Wednesday, July 29.

If you don't have the Discovery channel on cable, it's available on a streaming basis from several cable alternatives. Best of all, many of the services offer a free trial to new customers.

YouTube TV usually costs $82.99 per month but comes with a free trial and $15 off each of your first five months.

The DirecTV MyEntertainment genre pack costs $42.99 per month after a 5-day free trial, and Hulu + Live TV costs $89.99 per month after a 3-day free trial.

Alternatively, the HBO Max streaming service starts at $10.99 per month.

Can you watch "Expedition X: Atomic Sharks" in the U.K.?

"Shark Week" programming typically airs on Discovery+ in the U.K. at a later date.

At the time of publication, plans for "Expedition X: Atomic Sharks" and the other 2026 specials are still firmly under wraps.

If you're currently in the U.K. for work or on vacation from the U.S., you can still catch "Expedition X: Atomic Sharks" by using a VPN, such as Surfshark.

Watch "Expedition X: Atomic Sharks" from anywhere

If you're traveling abroad you can access your usual streaming services from anywhere with a good VPN.

A VPN, or virtual private network, is a piece of internet security software that can alter your device's digital location, unlocking the geo-restrictions on most streaming platforms.

Our expert colleagues at TechRadar rate Surfshark as one of the best VPNs. Not only is it great for unblocking streaming services, it has top-level security features, a reasonable price tag and, right now, a big discount.

We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example: 1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service). 2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad. We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.

"Demon cavefish" have been discovered lurking in caverns beneath a contaminated U.S. Army base in Alabama, a new study has found.

Biologists have named the pale, eyeless creatures Demogorgonichthys arcanus, after the monstrous Demogorgons from Netflix's "Stranger Things" and the underworld demon of Greek mythology from which the Demogorgon name derives. They are likely among the rarest fishes in the world.

The find came as a shock to scientists because the cavefish's home, Bobcat Cave, has been extensively studied in recent decades. The subterranean system is part of U.S. Army site Redstone Arsenal, which was historically a center for chemical weapons production. Bobcat Cave is regularly subject to water quality monitoring and part of efforts to save endangered Alabama Cave Shrimp (Palaemonias alabamae), which also call the cave home.

In a new study, published July 6 in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers described the cavefish find as a "discovery in plain sight." Study lead author Matthew Niemiller, who directs the cave biology lab at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, encountered the cavefish by chance during a routine survey of Bobcat Cave's largest chamber, known as the Shrimp Room, in early 2025.

"I slipped in the mud at the back of the Shrimp Room and fell into a deeper pool," Niemiller told Live Science in an email. "During my graceful plummet, I disturbed a cavefish and crayfish underneath a rock ledge."

Niemiller quickly snapped photos of the animals using an underwater camera before silt clouded his view of them. It wasn't until several days later, when he checked the photos, that he noticed the cavefish looked different from southern cavefish (Typhlichthys subterraneus), a known species within the cave.

"The new cavefish had a pronounced hump behind the head, a longer, flatter snout, and unbranched fin rays," Niemiller said. "We returned a few days later, before a storm system forecasted to dump several inches of rain moved into the area. On the next trip, we confirmed that nearly half of the cavefish we observed were this new species."

Niemiller studied the cavefish with colleagues at Auburn University, The University of Alabama and Mississippi State University, with students performing much of the lab work. Genetic analysis revealed that demon cavefish didn't fit within any known cavefish group. Notably, demon cavefish carry unique disabling mutations for rhodopsin, a light-sensitive protein that would otherwise support dim light vision. Niemiller noted that this mattered for two reasons.

"First, it's a great example of 'use it or lose it' at the molecular level," he said. "In total darkness, vision is useless, so natural selection stops maintaining the gene, and mutations simply accumulate. Second, and more importantly, the specific way this fish's rhodopsin is broken is different from how it's broken in the related cavefish it lives alongside. That's strong evidence they lost their vision independently."

Demon cavefish and southern cavefish seemingly losing the ability to see independently is an example of how evolution can lead different species to converge on the same physical characteristics when they're suitable for an environment.

The conditions in Bobcat Cave have likely been influenced by the history of the military base above it. Redstone Arsenal made various chemical weapons during World War II. At the end of the war, vast quantities of chemical munitions were buried at the site, along with chemical weapons from overseas, like British mustard gas and nerve agents and other toxic weapons recovered from Nazi Germany. The site is the subject of ongoing investigations, clean-ups and storage.

Researchers have found that the cave contains elevated levels of trace metals compared to what would normally be found in such a habitat. However, Niemiller noted that the restricted-access status of the military installation does limit disturbance in the cave.

A bigger concern for the demon cavefish is that surface water connects to the cave's groundwater, so the life in the cave is also exposed to runoff, sediment and contaminants linked to the nearby city of Huntsville. As demon cavefish are, as far as we know, restricted to a single cave, they are very vulnerable to extinction.

The researchers concluded that demon cavefish would meet the criteria for becoming a "critically endangered" species, under the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List — a framework for determining a species' conservation status. It's unknown how many demon cavefish live within the cave, and it's likely that many of them will be in places that are inaccessible to researchers.

"Like other cavefish, these animals probably spend much of their lives down in the water-filled aquifer below the cave, beyond where we can observe them, so any single survey is a snapshot, not a census," Niemiller said. "What we can say with some confidence is that it's known from just one cave system, it's rarely encountered, and by every measure we use, it qualifies as critically imperiled."

Fortunately for the cavefish, Bobcat Cave is already known for being a home for endangered Alabama Cave Shrimp. Since 1990, the cave has been a focus for water quality monitoring, shrimp surveys, and other biological investigations that should also help the newfound species.

"What protects the shrimp's water protects the fish's water too," Niemiller said.

A pod of killer whales has sunk another yacht off northwestern Spain, reinforcing a bizarre pattern of vessel encounters that has stretched on for more than six years along the Iberian coast.

In the incident, reported Friday (July 24), the whales destroyed the rudder of a 46-foot-long (14 meters) Swedish-flagged yacht off Galicia in northwestern Spain, forcing the two people aboard to send a mayday call. A Spanish coastguard vessel towed them to safety, Spain-based news outlet Sur in English reported.

The incident came after several other encounters in the same waters earlier that week, including one in which a pleasure craft called the Idem sank near Estaca de Bares, the northernmost point of the Iberian Peninsula. The ship sank after the killer whales, also known as orcas (Orcinus orca), destroyed its rudder. Both occupants were rescued.

That makes the Idem at least the eighth boat lost to these encounters since they began, according to groups that track the incidents. More than 700 interactions between orcas and vessels have been logged since 2020, ranging from a brief nudge to a multihour rudder-ramming session, according to the Atlantic Orca Working Group, the Spanish-Portuguese research collective that has coordinated data collection on the phenomenon from the start.

Researchers have identified roughly 15 individual killer whales involved in these incidents, out of an Iberian subpopulation of fewer than 50. The group is so small that the International Union for Conservation of Nature lists it as critically endangered, as it is dependent mainly on Atlantic bluefin tuna for its food.

The family-like cluster is thought to be led by a female known as White Gladis. That name comes from an early theory researchers themselves once floated: that White Gladis suffered some kind of traumatic run-in with a boat and that the encounter flipped a behavioral switch, with her being the first in the group to start ramming rudders.

Alfredo López Fernandez, a biologist with the Atlantic Orca Working Group, told Live Science in 2023 that this kind of defensive, trauma-driven origin was gaining traction among researchers at the time. But "defensive" isn't "vengeful" — and the idea has since curdled online into a punchier revenge story most scientists studying the population don't endorse.

So why do orcas go after the boats? Nobody knows for certain, but the leading explanation is simple: Orcas are some of the most social animals on the planet, and social animals pick up habits from one another the way trends spread through a friend group. Researchers describe the behavior as socially learned — young orcas appear to watch adults ram a rudder and then try it themselves, and the habit has spread through the group over time.

A 2022 study in the journal Marine Mammal Science found that the killer whales usually targeted sailing boats and often lost interest after striking the rudder and causing the boat to stop.

None of that makes the encounters any less disruptive for the people living through them. The standard guidance from authorities like the Maritime Safety and Rescue Society and the Atlantic Orca Working Group, refined over repeated encounters, is to cut the engine, drop the sails if possible, disengage the autopilot, and let go of the wheel entirely, giving the orcas nothing to push against. Boats that follow this protocol tend to sustain less damage than those that don’t.

Sailors are asked to report every encounter. Each one adds to the data scientists are using to try to solve a years-long mystery.

We've all heard of the fearsome megalodon, the largest known shark to have ever lived, but how about its predecessors, contemporaries and successors? Shark Week premiere "Jurassic Sharks" uses CGI to flesh out the fossils of ancient cartilaginous fish, and Live Science is here with all the TV and streaming details.

Using fossil records and "cutting-edge" visual effects, "Jurassic Sharks" will attempt to trace the ancestry of modern-day species back through millions of years, and build a picture of the prehistoric ocean, complete with superpredators that are both weird and awe-inspiring.

It's a must-watch for budding palaeontologists and animal fans alike.

How to watch "Jurassic Sharks" in the U.S.

"Jurassic Sharks" airs on Discovery at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Tuesday, July 28.

If you don't have the Discovery channel on cable, it's available on a streaming basis from several cable alternatives. Best of all, many of the services offer a free trial to new customers.

YouTube TV usually costs $82.99 per month but comes with a free trial and $15 off each of your first five months.

The DirecTV MyEntertainment genre pack costs $42.99 per month after a 5-day free trial, and Hulu + Live TV costs $89.99 per month after a 3-day free trial.

Alternatively, the HBO Max streaming service starts at $10.99 per month.

Can you watch "Jurassic Sharks" in the U.K.?

"Shark Week" programming typically airs on Discovery+ in the U.K. at a later date.

At the time of publication, plans for "Jurassic Sharks" and the other 2026 "Shark Week" specials are still firmly under wraps.

If you're currently in the U.K. for work or on vacation from the U.S., you can still catch "Jurassic Sharks" by using a VPN, such as Surfshark.

Watch "Jurassic Sharks" from anywhere

If you're traveling abroad you can access your usual streaming services from anywhere with a good VPN.

A VPN, or virtual private network, is a piece of internet security software that can alter your device's digital location, unlocking the geo-restrictions on most streaming platforms.

Our expert colleagues at TechRadar rate Surfshark as one of the best VPNs. Not only is it great for unblocking streaming services, it has top-level security features, a reasonable price tag and, right now, a big discount.

We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example: 1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service). 2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad. We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.

Great white sharks can launch themselves clear out of the ocean, but why they breach so dramatically remains one of marine biology's biggest mysteries. "Air Jaws: Red, White and Breach", premiering during "Shark Week" 2026, follows a team of filmmakers and scientists as they investigate the shark's behavior.

"Shark Week" is now in its 25th year, and to mark this milestone, Jeff Kurr and marine biologist Alison Towner head to the Californian coast, which has seen an unexpected surge of great whites (Carcharodon carcharias) breaching the surface.

With cinematographer Andy Casagrande in tow, "Air Jaws: Red, White and Breach" aims to capture this behavior in full glory, and to establish why breaching great whites have entered American waters.

How to watch "Air Jaws: Red, White and Breach" in the U.S.

"Air Jaws: Red, White and Breach" airs on Discovery at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Sunday, July 26.

If you don't have the Discovery channel on cable, it's available on a streaming basis from several cable alternatives. Best of all, many of the services offer a free trial to new customers.

YouTube TV usually costs $82.99 per month but comes with a free trial and $15 off each of your first five months.

The DirecTV MyEntertainment genre pack costs $42.99 per month after a 5-day free trial, and Hulu + Live TV costs $89.99 per month after a 3-day free trial.

Alternatively, the HBO Max streaming service starts at $10.99 per month.

Can you watch "Air Jaws: Red, White and Breach" in the U.K.?

"Shark Week" programming typically airs on Discovery+ in the U.K. at a later date.

At the time of publication, plans for "Air Jaws: Red, White and Breach" and the other 2026 specials are still firmly under wraps.

If you're currently in the U.K. for work or on vacation from the U.S., you can still catch "Air Jaws: Red, White and Breach" by using a VPN, such as Surfshark.

Watch "Air Jaws: Red, White and Breach" from anywhere

If you're traveling abroad you can access your usual streaming services from anywhere with a good VPN.

A VPN, or virtual private network, is a piece of internet security software that can alter your device's digital location, unlocking the geo-restrictions on most streaming platforms.

Our expert colleagues at TechRadar rate Surfshark as one of the best VPNs. Not only is it great for unblocking streaming services, it has top-level security features, a reasonable price tag and, right now, a big discount.

We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example: 1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service). 2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad. We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.

Shark Week 2026 is here! This year's highlights include experiments testing great white intelligence, Molly Carlson's death-defying freefall dive into a reef shark feeding frenzy, and a deep-dive on the thresher’s tail strike. The 20-strong lineup of shows airs across seven nights, and Live Science is here with all the TV and streaming details.

Shark Week still packages its science with ominous music and blockbuster titles, but its strongest moments challenge the familiar "mindless killer" myth, presenting sharks instead as intelligent, highly specialized predators whose decline could destabilize the world’s oceans.

Look out for a great study of the highly aggressive and erratic sharks in the waters off Marshall Islands, where the United States military detonated 67 nuclear bombs between 1946 and 1958.

And if you're a tech fan, there's plenty of new camera systems and tagging technology to discover.

Read on as we explain how to watch "Shark Week" 2026 from anywhere.

How to watch "Shark Week" 2026 in the U.S.

"Shark Week" 2026 comprises 20 brand-new TV specials that will air on Discovery from 8 p.m. ET/PT every evening from Sunday, July 26 to Saturday, Aug. 1.

If you don't have the Discovery channel on cable, it's available on a streaming basis from several cable alternatives. Best of all, many offer a free trial to new customers.

YouTube TV usually costs $82.99 per month but comes with a free trial and $15 off each of your first five months.

The DirecTV MyEntertainment genre pack costs $42.99 per month after a 5-day free trial, and Hulu + Live TV costs $89.99 per month after a 3-day free trial.

Alternatively, you can watch Shark Week 2026 on HBO Max (from $10.99 per month).

Can you watch "Shark Week" 2026 in the U.K.?

"Shark Week" programming typically airs on Discovery Plus in the U.K. at a later date.

At the time of publication, plans for the 2026 slate of specials are still firmly under wraps.

If you're currently in the U.K. for work or on vacation from the U.S., you can still catch "Shark Week" 2026 by using a VPN, such as Surfshark.

Watch "Shark Week" 2026 from anywhere

If you're traveling abroad you can access your usual streaming services from anywhere with a good VPN.

A VPN, or virtual private network, is a piece of internet security software that can alter your device's digital location, unlocking the geo-restrictions on most streaming platforms.

Our expert colleagues at TechRadar rate Surfshark as one of the best VPNs. Not only is it great for unblocking streaming services, it has top-level security features, a reasonable price tag and, right now, a big discount.

"Shark Week" 2026 trailer

When is "Shark Week" 2026?

"Shark Week" 2026 runs from Sunday, July 26 to Saturday, Aug. 1 in the United States.

"Shark Week" 2026 episodes

Sunday, July 26

► 8 p.m. ET/PT – "K-Pop Shark Heroes"

After a recent series of shark encounters off the Korean Peninsula, actor and comedian Ken Jeong joins forces with Grammy-nominated singer and lifetime shark lover Rei Ami on a mission to reshape the perception of sharks across East Asia and around the globe, fueled by the power of K-pop.

► 9 p.m. ET/PT – "Air Jaws: Red, White and Breach"

A new phenomenon is emerging as great white sharks are captured on film breaching in California like never before. Filmmaker Jeff Kurr, marine biologist Alison Towner, and cinematographer Andy Casagrande set out to capture this unprecedented behavior and uncover the secrets behind the Great American Breach.

► 10 p.m. ET/PT – "Invasion of the Mega Sharks"

Shark researcher Neil Hammerschlag, joined by Shark Week expert Paul de Gelder, leads a team to track down Big Rose, a record-breaking great white believed to be one of largest predators in the North Atlantic. Using innovative tagging technology and daring field operations, they venture to a newly discovered shark hotspot off Nova Scotia aiming to transform our understanding of these ocean giants.

Monday, July 27

► 8 p.m. ET/PT – "Bull Shark Dinner Bell"

Shark attack survivor and advocate Paul De Gelder teams up with apex predator specialist Rosie Moore in Jupiter, Florida to investigate what triggers giant bull sharks to confront humans. The team tests how human behavior in the ocean, extreme weather events and prey preferences influence shark attacks.

► 9 p.m. ET/PT – "House of Sharks"

Off the coast of New Zealand lies a hidden shark battleground, where three distinct groups of great whites organize into competing "houses" and may be competing with one another to gain control of a major seal feeding ground. Marine biologist Tristan Guttridge and underwater cinematographer Kina Scollay venture into the middle of the action on an epic expedition. As they investigate, they uncover the possibility that these clans of great whites recognize their kin and return season after season to their ancestral territories, raising the theory that these predators aren't solitary hunters but rival dynasties at war.

► 10 p.m. ET/PT – "Biggest Mako on Earth"

For decades, rumors have swirled about massive, 15- to 20-foot-long (4 to 6 meters) mako sharks patrolling the deep waters off Southern California. Long dismissed as fishers' tales, new footage, along with a recently published photo capturing a mako that appears to stretch 15 feet, is now forcing scientists to rethink everything they know about these oceanic apex predators. Marine biologist Tristan Guttridge, alongside conservationist Kendyl Berna and shark tagger Keith Poe, go on an investigation to determine whether the world's biggest mako is real — and hunting in the coastal waters of Santa Catalina.

Tuesday, July 28

► 8 p.m. ET/PT – "Jurassic Sharks"

In a Shark Week first, revolutionary CGI resurrects the ocean's most bizarre Jurassic (201 million to 143 million years ago) sharks, bringing them to life like never before. Guided by the rare living sharks that once shared their seas, real-world expeditions seamlessly merge with cutting-edge visual effects to uncover stories from the deep and prehistoric seas in ways never before possible.

► 9 p.m. ET/PT – "Jaws vs Orca"

For millennia, the great white shark has reigned as the ocean's ultimate apex predator. But now, a new challenger is emerging: the orca. Around the world, sharks are washing ashore with their livers removed with chilling precision while in the Strait of Gibraltar, orcas are targeting sailboats — ramming hulls, crippling rudders and sinking vessels. To investigate this shift in behavior, Tristan Guttridge explores orcas' attacks on boats to reveal how these predators hunt and how they may be taking down great white sharks.

► 10 p.m. ET/PT – "Chum Island: Catching a Killer"

In this Shark Week whodunnit, a rare surge of highly aggressive shark attacks hit a tight-knit community off Australia’s southern coast, prompting marine biologist Riley Elliott to find and tag the oceanic suspects. But when he discovers this could be a new, elusive population of sharks, he builds the world's first "chum island" to lure them in and uncover if they are the ones responsible for the attacks.

Wednesday, July 29

► 8 p.m. ET/PT – "Expedition X: Atomic Sharks"

Phil Torres and Heather Amaro travel 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) west of the U.S. to the remote Marshall Islands, home to the world's largest shark sanctuary, where apex predators are exhibiting highly aggressive behaviors and erratic swimming patterns. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States military detonated 67 nuclear bombs around the island, raising questions about their lasting impact on marine life. Now, the team dives into these dangerous waters to investigate reports of "mutant" sharks and uncover whether atomic blasts could be to blame.

► 9 p.m. ET/PT – "Expedition Unknown: Shark Secrets"

Global explorer Josh Gates travels back in time and dives into the history behind some of the world’s most infamous shark encounters, from the earliest known shark attack to the mystery surrounding the shark feeding frenzy faced by sailors following the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. He also investigates the legendary "Stronsay Beast," a mysterious creature that washed ashore in Scotland in 1808.

► 10 p.m. ET/PT – "Alien Sharks: Untamed America"

In celebration of America’s 250th anniversary, wildlife biologist Forrest Galante embarks on a nationwide quest to find the nation’s most bizarre and dangerous "alien" sharks – from glowing swell sharks to elusive sawfish.

Thursday, July 30

► 8 p.m. ET/PT – "What Shark Attacked?"

Shark attacks are extremely rare, but when they happen, the first question is always the same: What kind of shark was it? Leading shark scientists Tom Hird and Rosie Moore, alongside conservationist Kinga Philipps, investigate mysterious attacks from around the world using cutting-edge forensic analysis – including bite pattern comparison, geographic profiling, video evidence, and eyewitness testimony – to identify the species responsible and uncover why these life-threatening encounters occur.

► 9 p.m. ET/PT – "How to Train a Great White"

Tristan Guttridge ventures into shark-infested waters off New Zealand to answer a provocative question: Can sharks be trained? Using techniques pioneered by the U.S. Navy to train dolphins in complex cognitive tasks, the team tests whether these apex predators can learn, solve problems and respond to cues. If successful, the experiment can potentially redefine shark intelligence and transform our understanding of one of the ocean's most misunderstood predators.

► 10 p.m. ET/PT – "Ultimate Shark Dive"

World-class Red Bull high diver Molly Carlson leaps from a helicopter hovering above the open ocean, targeting a narrow plexiglass cage surrounded by circling reef sharks, or risking a direct plunge into a chum-filled feeding frenzy. From concept to execution, Carlson pushes herself to the limit with a record-setting stunt that no high diver has ever attempted.

Friday, July 31

► 8 p.m. ET/PT – "Secrets of the Great White Kill"

For centuries, great whites were believed to simply stalk their prey. Now, groundbreaking science suggests that these alpha sharks are highly intelligent predators that adapt their hunting techniques in real time. In this program, the full range of great white hunting tactics is revealed, reinforcing the species' status as one of the ocean's top predators.

► 9 p.m. ET/PT – "Sharkzilla Takes New York"

After a wave of mauled marine life washes ashore in New York, conservation biologist Craig O'Connell launches an investigation to find the culprit. When it leads to an old nuclear dumping ground teaming with great whites and makos, he is left with the theory that the predator may be radioactive. A deeper dive reveals an unexpected hotspot for massive makos off the coast of the Hamptons, suggesting that these waters may be hiding something even bigger beneath the surface.

► 10 p.m. ET/PT – "My Strange Shark Addiction"

How far will people go to fuel their fascination with sharks? For four devoted shark "fin-atics," their obsession shapes every aspect of their lives. From a dentist who spends every spare moment searching for life-size shark replicas to a woman who insists she has a special connection with her shark "boyfriend," and a world-record holder covered in shark tattoos, this special explores how their daily routines, relationships and finances revolve entirely around sharks.

Saturday, August 1

► 8 p.m. ET/PT – "Great White Highway"

Great white sharks are pushing farther up the East coast than ever before and in far greater numbers, leading to close encounters and forcing beach closures. Now, a team of shark scientists races to install high-tech receivers and tag as many great whites as possible.

► 9 p.m. ET/PT – "Thresher Shark: Stun to Kill"

The physics behind the thresher shark’s devastating tail strike has long remained a mystery — until now. For the first time ever, the discovery of a shallow-water feeding ground has made observing this behavior possible. Now, shark scientist Craig O’Connell and marine biologist Aliah Banchik dive into the direct line of fire as they attempt to reveal exactly how these predators use their tails to stun and kill.

Is there a "Shark Week" 2026 host?

John Cena and Jason Momoa have hosted recent editions of "Shark Week", but the 2026 incarnation won't have a single overarching presenter stitching its constituent parts together.

We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example: 1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service). 2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad. We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.

A team of UCLA scientists has resorted to posting content on OnlyFans to raise money for research amid huge federal funding cuts to U.S. science. But the videos aren't of themselves, they're exclusive recordings of marmots.

"I spend a lot of time waiting for marmots to do things and had the idea one slow morning," Daniel Blumstein, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA, who leads the project, told Live Science in an email. "When I came back with this idea, one of my graduate students immediately said we MUST do this! So here we are!"

Researchers at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) have been studying yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventer) at a field station in the Rocky Mountains near Crested Butte, Colorado, since 1962. "The RMBL marmot study is the second oldest continuous study of individually marked mammals in the world," Blumstein said. "We have up to 65 years of data on population dynamics, social and anti-predator behavior and ask a lot of questions about how animals respond to a changing environment."

Yellow-bellied marmots are one of 15 marmot species, a group of cat-size ground squirrels that can be found throughout the Northern Hemisphere. This particular species is widely distributed throughout the Rocky Mountains and several mountain ranges in California. The species live in social groups and are active during the day, which makes them a great subject for long-term behavioral studies.

"Long-term research like ours is both very valuable to understand how and why things change over time, and our project has been very productive," Blumstein said.

However, collecting data over such long periods comes with a significant price tag. And with federal funding cuts draining research budgets across the country, Blumstein and his team have had to look for other methods to raise money for their research. Enter OnlyMarms.

On June 17, the RMBL Marmot Project announced on Instagram that "the state of funding is so bad we are turning to OnlyFans, or as we like to call it 'OnlyMarms'."

OnlyFans is a subscription platform that allows users to pay creators to see exclusive photos and videos. The platform has become popular with adult-only content creators, but it hosts others too, including musicians, athletes and celebrities — and now marmots.

"We’re trying this out of frustration with an extremely challenging funding environment," Blumstein said. "If we’re lucky, it can help raise money for supplies and some expenses. But unless we are very lucky, it won’t replace the federal funding that has driven discovery in the US since the 1950s."

However, for anyone hoping for spicy marmot content, you might be a bit disappointed. "[It's] almost all G-rated content of marmots playing, being cute, digging, bringing plants to their burrows…normal routine stuff for marmots," Blumstein said. "The occasional scuffle makes it PG rated."

Emily Renkey, who also works on the project, said the team hopes to add videos of marmot pups soon.

"Our 'Onlymarms' page has gotten a bit of engagement since we started it a bit over a month back," Renkey told Live Science. "We've gotten 735 page visits and have 44 fans."

But how much has OnlyMarms actually been able to raise? "Not much," Blumstein said. "We’re letting folks have free subscriptions and ask for tips. They [OnlyFans] take 20% and I have to pay taxes on the balance."

Even so, the team is hopeful that the page is helping to increase public engagement and interest in the project. "Overall I think this can be an amazing way to teach people more about animal social behavior, which can sometimes be hard to observe," Renkey said. "Even we are learning more about marmots through these up close glimpses the game cameras provide."

While it is difficult to get signed consent from the marmots to use this content online, Blumstein said that the funds raised would be used to help protect the creatures in a rapidly changing world. "We are using these funds to help continue the study which provides valuable information about them and how they’re responding to climate change," he said.

The OnlyFans account is just one way the team has tried to share its research with new audiences. "We work hard to translate our research findings to the public," Blumstein said. "Our lab’s running a Fat Marmot Week contest this summer. We're hoping this will let people learn more about these fascinating alpine critters!"

One of the ocean's most intelligent and aggressive predators has once again surprised scientists with a curious new behavior. In the Gulf of California, researchers witnessed orcas working together to smash dead sunfish into bits — a suspected food processing technique that makes it easier for younger whales to feed on the enormous bony fish that weigh up to 4,400 pounds (2,000 kilograms).

In two separate encounters, one orca gripped a sharp-tail sunfish (Masturus lanceolatus) while another orca charged toward the fish. The first whale released the carcass just before impact, allowing its companion to slam into the fish at high speed and scatter fragments of fish flesh throughout the water.

"It was unlike anything I'd witnessed before," Kathryn Ayres, a scientist at the conservation nonprofit Beneath the Waves told Live Science in an email. "As a scientist, moments like this are incredibly exciting because you realize you're observing something that may never have been documented in detail before — as you can tell in the video!"

Ayres and her colleagues dubbed the behavior "ram-to-fragment." Their observations, published July 23 in the journal Frontiers in Ethology, suggest the killer whales were not trying to kill the sunfish, which were already dead and appeared to have been disembowelled. Instead, the orcas may have been breaking down the bulky carcasses so members of the group, particularly younger animals, could feed more easily.

Hunting in action

The first encounter Ayres observed took place in July 2024 near an offshore seamount off Baja California Sur, Mexico. An adult female orca held a sharp-tail sunfish by its tail-like clavus, or rudder, while an adult male orca accelerated toward it, belly-up. The female released the fish an instant before the male struck.

The collision produced a loud noise and caused the sunfish's tissue to disintegrate. In the video, Ayres' shock is evident as she can be heard exclaiming, "Oh my god!"

A juvenile orca then swam into the cloud of suspended flesh and ate the smaller pieces, while the adults fed on what remained of the main carcass.

A second encounter, which the researchers credited diver Héctor Franz for filming in September 2025, followed much of the same sequence. One adult orca stabilized the sunfish, another rammed it and a calf later pulled tissue from the broken carcass.

Ayres had previously watched orcas hunt ocean sunfish (Mola mola), but this was different.

"I had also seen orcas ram their prey previously, but I had never witnessed an impact powerful enough to completely fragment the tissue like this," Ayres said. "That was what made this observation so remarkable."

The maneuver resembled coordinated attacks Ayres and her team had previously documented, in which orcas confronted whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) — the largest living fish — in the Gulf of California. In those hunts, some orcas took turns ramming it.

Why make fish confetti?

Ramming is not a new killer whale hunting technique, said Matt Hansen, a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries who was not involved in the study. However, the hold-and-release sequences and shattering of carcasses may be new, Hansen told Live Science in an email.

The researchers proposed several possible explanations for the behavior. The predominant assumption is that the adults were processing food for younger whales. Orcas frequently tear apart prey and share portions with calves and juveniles, and in both newly described encounters, young killer whales were present.

But two observations are not enough to show that the adults were deliberately feeding or teaching the youngsters, Heather Hill, a professor and chair of psychology at St. Mary's University in Texas who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email.

"Whether or not it represents parental investment, observational learning, or distribution of resources remains circumstantial in my opinion," she said.

The researchers also suggested that the behavior could have been playful. Orcas are highly intelligent and social, and they sometimes manipulate, toss or strike prey without immediately eating it. However, Hill said that the two encounters appeared more practical than playful.

"If it was for fun, I would have expected multiple attempts made with variations in speed, point of contact, force of impact, and initiators because the point of playing is to try different things and not destroy the toy too soon," she said. "Since it appears that these events were 'one and done' so to speak, probably less playful and more functional — to eat the fish and maybe to model a foraging technique and possibly to share resources with the younger animal."

The study authors also raise a more speculative possibility that dispersing the sunfish's microbe-rich skin and gelatinous tissue could somehow affect the surrounding water or expose the orcas to potentially beneficial microbes. But what that benefit might be is unclear.

"I don't see how dispersing the skin into the water column would have a different effect from eating it," Hansen said. "Unless the authors are suggesting [the orcas] are using it like a lotion on their own skin? Who knows, the world is weird and wonderful."

Orca quiz: Will you sink or swim?

Scientists have discovered how mice survive at extreme altitudes on the tips of icy dormant volcanoes in the Andes.

The area where the mice call home extends more than 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) above the world's highest human settlement. The air is thin, temperatures are blisteringly cold, and a desert ecosystem ensures water and vegetation are extremely scarce.

"As a mountain climber standing on the summit of these peaks, the idea that there could be animals living in these barren godforsaken environments is just really mind-boggling," Jay Storz, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, told Live Science.

In 2020, Storz led a team of mountaineering scientists who recorded Andean leaf-eared mice (Phyllotis vaccarum) at a record-breaking altitude of 22,110 feet (6,739 meters). The mice were living on the summit of Llullaillaco, the world's highest historically active — now dormant — volcano, located on the border between Argentina and Chile.

Now, in a new study published July 9 in the journal Science, Storz and his colleagues have revealed the biological mechanisms behind the mice's extreme survival. It turns out that the species has evolved a variety of adaptations to survive at such high altitudes, including the ability to eat plants that would normally be toxic.

Before the discovery of the high-altitude mice, researchers had assumed that mammals could only survive up to around 18,000 feet (5,500 m) above sea level. But these hardy animals smashed that record, while also thriving at lower altitudes.

"One of the really notable things about this particular species is that it has such a broad elevational range, from sea level along the desert coastline of northern Chile, all the way up to the summits of some of the highest peaks in the Andes," Storz said.

To better understand these remarkable mice, the researchers studied members of the species at low, middle and high altitudes between 2020 and 2023. The work mixed mountain climbing and animal surveying techniques, with Storz and his team ascending the mountains and setting traps to catch and record the mice.

Storz said that a well-acclimatized mountain climber can tolerate these high elevations for a very short period, but that the conditions are "not remotely compatible with long-term human survival."

The expeditions can be dangerous even for experienced climbers: one of Storz's colleagues was evacuated during a separate expedition in Peru after they developed high-altitude pulmonary edema — a life-threatening form of altitude sickness that causes fluid to build up in a climber's lungs.

The researchers sent some of their specimens to labs in Chile for further analysis. This included putting the mice into small chambers and measuring how they adapted to extreme cold and oxygen deprivation. The team also sequenced the Andean leaf-eared mouse genome, which revealed a variety of local adaptations to different altitudes. For example, the mice living at high elevations were better at maintaining their body heat and oxygen levels than those taken from lower altitudes, according to a statement released by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Another change in the high-altitude mice's genes enabled them to digest food and detoxify plants that would otherwise be harmful to them, according to a statement released by McMaster University in Canada. This special adaptation helps the mice get enough food on the sparsely vegetated volcanoes.

The researchers also revealed that the high-altitude mice were much more active in the daytime, perhaps due to a lack of predators and warmer temperatures during those hours. However, despite local adaptations, the mice were still extremely similar genetically across their elevation range. All of the mouse populations overlapped, which prevented high-altitude individuals from becoming isolated or especially distinct from their low-altitude kin.

Not all of the mice survived the researchers' study. To fully understand the biology of the mice, researchers needed to euthanize them and study their tissues. They also wanted to preserve "voucher" specimens to act as permanent representatives of the species in museums, which researchers can keep returning to for further study. According to the study, the team collected 167 of these voucher specimens.

Storz noted that it's very valuable to have a biological record of specimens archived in museum collections for future generations. He added that their work was not having any impact on the viability of the mice populations, and that the animals were killed humanely, although he did not disclose any details.

"King of the mountains"

Study co-author Graham Scott, a professor of biology at McMaster University in Canada, said that the take-home message of the new research was how life can overcome such extreme environments, and not just survive but thrive. In this case, the mice did this by developing solutions for the cold, oxygen deprivation and food scarcity.

"It just shows the complex ways that evolution has made these animals the king of the mountains," Scott said.

Enduring harsh conditions high in the Andes likely comes with some benefits. Scott said that competition is probably the biggest reason for the mice living at such high elevations. The mice are also pretty much left to their own devices, and thus likely have less to fear from predators.

But this begs the question: Are there any animals living higher than the mice?

"Birds are always a bit hard to nail down because, of course, they can fly and there's certainly records of birds flying at higher elevations than that," Scott said. "But we think this is probably the highest-dwelling animal."

The skeleton of a wolf or bat you admire at the natural history museum may look pristine, but it wasn't always that way ‪—‬ there's a good chance flesh-eating beetles helped prepare those bones for display. For decades, many museums have relied on colonies of dermestid beetles to strip soft tissue, like skin and muscles, from skeletons. Unlike the harsh chemicals that would otherwise be used for bone preparation, these beetles can be gentler and clean hard-to-reach areas. But these colonies are a hassle to keep up, and escaped beetles can even be dangerous for valuable museum specimens that don't need their skin removed. Now, researchers may have found an even better biological cleanup crew.

In a new study published July 1 in the journal PLOS One, scientists found that superworms (Zophobas morio) — large beetle larvae commonly sold as pet food — can clean skeletons just as effectively while offering practical advantages. The larvae removed soft tissue from animals ranging from tiny bats to a 9-pound (4.2 kilograms) wolf without damaging even the most delicate bones.

Two of the paper's authors, Niloofar Alaei Kakhki, a postdoctoral researcher at the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart in Germany, and Morteza Monfared, a researcher at the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad in Iran, answered our questions via email about what makes superworms unique and how they could be used in laboratories and museums.

Kenna Hughes-Castleberry: Why are these critters called "superworms?" What makes them different from other beetle larvae?

Niloofar Alaei Kakhki and Morteza Monfared: Compared with the larvae of many other beetles, Zophobas morio larvae are much larger, which is one of the reasons they are so effective at removing soft tissue from bones.

What makes them truly unique, however, is their life cycle. Most beetle larvae pupate automatically once they reach the appropriate size. In contrast, superworms require an additional trigger: They must be isolated individually before they will pupate and develop into adult beetles. As long as they remain together in crowded conditions, they stay in the larval stage for several months.

This characteristic provides a major advantage for skeleton preparation. Because the larvae remain larvae for an extended period, they can be used repeatedly for cleaning specimens without rapidly developing into adult beetles. After each cleaning cycle, they can simply be fed a vegetable-based diet, allowed to recover, and then used again.

This also makes them safer than beetles commonly used for skeleton preparation, such as Dermestes. Adult dermestid beetles can reproduce, and females may lay eggs on ‪—‬ or even inside ‪—‬ skeletal specimens. If eggs or larvae are accidentally introduced into museum collections, they can become a serious pest and damage valuable specimens. Since superworms do not develop into adults unless they are intentionally isolated, this risk is greatly reduced, making the method safer for museum collections.

KHC: How did you figure out that the worms could clean the skeletons? Was that surprising?

NAK and MM: Several years ago, we started keeping a colony of Zophobas morio larvae (superworm) as live food for birds. As bird-watchers, we were often asked to help care for injured wild birds, so maintaining our own colony was more practical than purchasing larvae repeatedly. We fed the larvae mainly with vegetable scraps, such as cucumber, potato and banana peels.

One day, we ran out of vegetable waste. After lunch, we placed a leftover chicken bone with a small amount of meat still attached into the colony. To our surprise, the larvae gathered around it almost immediately and removed the remaining tissue with remarkable speed. Watching hundreds of larvae work together so efficiently was fascinating, and it immediately made us wonder whether they could be useful for something beyond animal feed.

At the same time, we were volunteering at the Zoology Museum of Ferdowsi University (ZMFUM), where preparing skeletal specimens was one of our regular responsibilities. We had experience with conventional preparation methods, including manual cleaning, boiling and burial. Although effective, these methods were often time-consuming and carried the risk of damaging delicate bones or losing small skeletal elements.

After observing how efficiently the larvae cleaned the chicken bone, we decided to test whether they could also prepare skeletal specimens. The first trials were remarkably successful. Within only a few hours, the larvae removed the soft tissues while leaving even delicate bones intact. Seeing the quality of the cleaned specimens was genuinely surprising and convinced us that this approach had real potential.

From that point on, whenever suitable animal specimens became available, we continued testing the method under different conditions, gradually refining it and optimizing the protocol. Over the following years, these observations evolved into the standardized, efficient and safe skeleton preparation method presented in our study. Yes, we were genuinely surprised. We already knew that superworms could consume a wide variety of organic materials, but we did not expect them to clean skeletons so quickly, so thoroughly, and with so little damage to even the most delicate bones.

KHC: How do these superworms compare to other skeleton-cleaning products, like chemical cleaners? Are the worms better or worse at this task?

NAK and MM: Based on our experience, superworms offer several important advantages over existing skeleton preparation methods.

Compared with dermestid beetles, one of the biggest advantages is colony management. Because superworms only pupate when they are isolated individually, their life cycle can be controlled much more easily. As long as they are kept together, they remain as larvae and continue cleaning specimens. This greatly reduces the risk of accidentally introducing adult beetles or their eggs into museum collections, which is a major concern when working with dermestid beetles.

Compared with traditional methods such as boiling, manual cleaning or burial, the larvae also save a great deal of time and effort. Manual cleaning, especially for delicate specimens, can take many hours and always carries the risk of breaking or losing small bones. In contrast, the larvae can remove soft tissues efficiently while preserving even fragile skeletal elements.

Every preparation method has its own strengths and limitations, and the best choice depends on the type of specimen and the goals of the researcher. However, based on our experience using a wide range of preparation techniques, we believe that superworms provide an efficient, safe and practical alternative for many museum and research applications.

Rather than replacing every existing method, we see this technique as a valuable new tool that museums, universities and research laboratories can adopt and adapt according to their own needs.

KHC: On average, how much does it cost to use the worms?

NAK and MM: It is difficult to estimate an average cost because prices vary considerably between countries and suppliers. Rather than the initial purchase price, the long-term maintenance cost is what makes this method attractive.

A colony can be established from a relatively small number of superworms. Once the larvae reach the appropriate stage, a portion of them can be isolated to pupate and develop into adult beetles. These adults reproduce and generate new larvae, allowing the colony to become self-sustaining over time.

The equipment required is also quite simple. The colony can be maintained in plastic or glass containers with wheat bran as the bedding, at approximately 25 degrees Celsius [77 degrees Fahrenheit]. Between skeleton preparation cycles, the larvae can be fed inexpensive vegetable scraps, allowing them to recover before being used again. Larvae can remain in the larval stage for several months, meaning the same colony can be used repeatedly.

Another advantage is that the colony size can easily be adjusted to meet the needs of different users. A museum or laboratory processing a large number of specimens can maintain a larger colony, while smaller collections can operate with far fewer larvae.

Overall, we find the method is relatively inexpensive to establish and maintain, especially when compared with the time, labor and specialized facilities often required for traditional skeleton preparation methods.

KHC: Do you envision museums and laboratories implementing these superworm cleaners in the future? Why or why not? Is the cost worth it?

NAK and MM: We believe this method has the potential to be adopted by many museums, universities and research laboratories, particularly those that regularly prepare skeletal specimens.

One of its greatest advantages is that it combines efficiency, safety and relatively low operating costs. Compared with some traditional approaches, it requires only basic equipment and does not rely on expensive chemicals or specialized enzymatic treatments. This makes it especially attractive for smaller museums and institutions with limited resources.

We also see advantages in terms of colony management. Because the life cycle of superworms can be controlled, the risk of introducing damaging museum pests is much lower than with some other biological cleaning methods. At the same time, the larvae can be reused repeatedly over several months, making the system practical for long-term use.

Ultimately, whether this method is worthwhile depends on the needs of each institution. However, based on our experience, we believe it offers an excellent balance between cost, efficiency, safety and specimen quality. Perhaps one of the most rewarding aspects of this approach is that it works with a natural biological process rather than against it. Instead of relying on harsh treatments, the soft tissues become a food source that supports the growth of another organism, creating a sustainable cycle while producing clean skeletal specimens. We believe this is one of the most appealing aspects of the method.

KHC: Are there any fun stories from your research you can share?

NAK and MM: We have collected quite a few memorable stories over the years!

One of the funniest happened while we were experimenting with burial as a skeleton preparation method. We buried the head of a Persian onager (Equus hemionus) on the university campus. Unfortunately, the specimen had already begun to decompose and had a very strong smell. Even after it was buried, we knew exactly where it was because that part of the campus still smelled terrible. We avoided walking past it whenever possible, but anyone who happened to pass by immediately noticed the odor. At one point, campus security even came over to ask what we were doing, probably wondering why we were digging a hole and burying something on university grounds!

Another memorable story involved our superworms colony itself. In the early days, we kept the larvae in our office at the Zoology Museum (ZMFUM). Almost everyone who entered the room was startled by the sight of thousands of large larvae constantly moving around in their containers. Many people kept their distance at first. But over time, as we explained their biology and demonstrated how useful they were for our research, people's reactions changed. Some visitors even became genuinely interested in the colony, and a few who were initially afraid eventually asked to hold the larvae themselves.

Those moments reminded us that science is not only about experiments and data; it can also change the way people think about animals that are often misunderstood.

KHC: If there's one thing you want our readers to take away from your work, what would it be?

NAK and MM: If there is one message we hope readers take away from our work, it is that nature often has far more to offer than we initially realize.

Many organisms are known for a single, well-established application. Zophobas morio, for example, is widely recognized as animal feed and, more recently, for its ability to consume certain plastics. Our work shows that the same species can also provide an entirely different and unexpected solution to a practical problem in museum science.

This reminds us that the first known application of an organism is not necessarily its most valuable one. Sometimes, its second or even third application can have an even greater impact. Discovering those possibilities begins with curiosity, careful observation and a willingness to ask new questions.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Animals come in a wide range of shapes and sizes, from spindly stick insects to blubbery whales. Round animals are harder to come by, but they're more common in the ocean than on land. So what is the roundest animal, and why are round animals uncommon?

At a glance, round animals might not seem that out of place on land. After all, small mammals like rabbits and pikas often look a bit spherical when their fur is puffed out and they're sitting. But Chris Law, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said this shape is mostly an illusion.

"They're physically not as round as they appear to be," he told Live Science.

A sphere has the lowest surface-area-to-volume ratio of any shape, which is ideal for heat conservation. Law said the ability to curl or scrunch into a sphere can be essential to the survival of small animals, which lose heat more quickly than larger animals do.

Rolling into a circle can also offer protection. To safeguard their vital organs, animals like armadillos and hedgehogs roll into balls when threatened, leaving only their armor or spikes exposed to predators. But when you look at the skeletons of these supposedly round critters and their shape when they're not scrunched up, they aren't round at all, Law said.

In fact, there are several reasons why round creatures are rarely found on land. Being perfectly round all the time would make it difficult to fit into small spaces, which is a key survival technique for avoiding predators, he added, and with the effects of gravity, having a lot of unsupported round mass puts strain on an animal's body. Overly round mammals, like obese cats and dogs, often suffer joint issues and other health problems.

"As a round animal, you're probably going to lose mobility, and you're going to be picked off by predators pretty easily," Law told Live Science.

There are exceptions, however. For example, beetles are small enough not to be affected as much by gravity and can fit into nooks and crannies without much wiggling. Their round shape coupled with their hard carapace makes them more difficult for predators to eat. And rain frogs puff up into a round shape to keep predators from removing them from their hiding spots.

If we're counting animals that are only round sometimes, then pill bugs (also known as rolly pollies) might take first place for the roundest land animal. But if not, rain frogs, and beetles like ladybugs, are the top contenders for the roundest land animal. But even these animals aren't perfectly round; ladybugs have flat bottoms to make it easier to move around, and rain frogs are less spherical when not puffed up.

Round sea animals

Being round at sea is a little more feasible than it is on land. In fact, sometimes, it's critical to survival.

Karly E. Cohen, a biomechanist at Friday Harbor Labs in Washington, studies lumpsuckers, a type of fish she describes as "quite round." These bulbous fish have suction cups made of enamel on their stomachs, which they use to latch on to surfaces at the bottom of the ocean. Lumpsuckers have armor, also made of enamel, covering their round shape. According to Cohen, lumpsuckers' roundness plays a huge part in keeping them attached to the seafloor or other surface. The curve of their bodies, coupled with the tooth armor, modifies the drag around the animal, creating a force that pushes them down rather than shooting them into the water column.

Although gravity still works underwater, buoyancy helps push objects up, meaning the effects of gravity do not feel as strong at sea as they do on land. According to Cohen, lumpsuckers can get around just fine, if a bit more slowly than their more streamlined neighbors. And like pufferfish and porcupine fish, lumpsuckers' round shape and uninviting exterior make them tough to swallow ‪—‬ literally.

"There's no real good way to eat an apple whole; you have to take a bite," Cohen told Live Science. "And then this thing is armored, so it's very hard to take a bite."

All about symmetry

Despite their spherical shape, lumpsuckers don't quite win the award for the roundest animal. Lumpsuckers, like most animals, have bilateral symmetry, which means they are divided into two symmetrical sides across one plane of symmetry. But there are animals that have radial symmetry, which means they are symmetrically arranged in a circle around a central point with multiple planes of symmetry.

Echinoderms ‪—‬ which include sea stars, sea urchins and sand dollars ‪—‬ have pentaradial symmetry, which means they have five planes of symmetry arranged around a central point. According to Laurent Formery, a developmental biologist at the Oceanological Observatory of Banyuls-sur-Mer in France who studies echinoderms, scientists aren't entirely sure of the benefits of pentaradial symmetry or why echinoderms are the only modern animals that have it.

However, Formery thinks being divided into five sections instead of two may give echinoderms better sensory perception than bilaterally symmetrical animals. Echinoderms have decentralized nervous systems, meaning that instead of a brain, they have a series of neurons distributed evenly across their body, and photoreceptors all over their skin.

"They are kind of like a big crawling eye and brain, so they are receiving information from everywhere," he told Live Science. "They have a completely different way, that is difficult for us to imagine, of interacting with their environment."

Because of this unique organization, radially symmetrical animals can sense predators from any direction. They can also easily switch which segment of their body is in the lead, making it easier for them to change directions to capture prey.

Discounting their spikes, certain species of sea urchin are almost perfectly spherical. Like lumpsuckers, sea urchins' spherical shape, coupled with their spines, makes them difficult meals for predators, Formery said. Sponges lack any symmetry, so they can develop all sorts of body shapes. One species, called the death ball sponge, looks like a Sputnik lamp, with many hook-covered spheres attached to its spindly "arms."'

Under the sea, urchins in the genus Histocidaris, like Histocidaris purpurata and Histocidaris formosa, are the closest to perfect spheres, making them the top candidate for roundest animal.

Although roundness might be uncommon in the animal kingdom, Cohen said it's fascinating to study these animals and the reasons for their adaptations.

"As somebody that's interested in the tools and ways organisms work in their environments," she said, "they're a real treasure trove of evolution."

What do you know about the animal kingdom? Test your knowledge with our animal quiz!

On July 14, 2026, "Gus," one of the most complete specimens of Tyrannosaurus rex, went to an as yet unidentified buyer for US$50.1 million. This auction at Sotheby's set a record for most valuable fossil ever sold. Another dinosaur has entered the luxury collectibles market, a reminder that even Earth's deepest history can be sold to the highest bidder.

To paleontologists like me, however, a fossil like "Gus" — excavated from the Hell Creek Formation in South Dakota over three years starting in 2021 by commercial collector Thomas Heitkamp and his team — is not a trophy or a work of art. It is an irreplaceable scientific archive. Fossils preserve evidence of evolution, extinction, growth, disease, injury and ancient ecosystems. They are finite, nonsubstitutable records of life’s history on Earth.

Science depends on independent verification of claims and healthy debate. Researchers must be able to revisit specimens, test earlier conclusions and ask new questions.

But once a scientifically important fossil enters a private collection, access for researchers is no longer guaranteed. Collectors typically sequester their fossils in their homes. Even when privately owned specimens are loaned to museums, the owners can change their minds, ending access at any time. This issue is especially of note when it comes to Tyrannosaurus rex; a 2025 study found that while there were 61 T. rex fossils in public trusts at that time, 71 were privately held.

That is why the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, of which I'm a long-term member and president-elect, has long argued that scientifically significant vertebrate fossils belong in the public trust, curated in museums and universities that preserve them permanently, make them available for research and share them with the public.

Finding a fossil

Supporters of commercial fossil sales often argue that without sales to private collectors, specimens like "Gus" would remain buried or erode away. They’re right about one thing: Discovery matters. Many extraordinary fossils have been found by ranchers, hikers, amateur collectors and commercial excavators. Paleontology is accessible to everyone who has an eye for observing nature — you don't need to be an expert with academic credentials to make an important discovery.

But discovery is only the beginning. A fossil's scientific value depends on careful documentation of where it was found, the rocks surrounding it, and the plants and animals preserved alongside it. Those details allow scientists to reconstruct ancient ecosystems, understand how an animal lived and died, and interpret how its remains became fossilized. When that contextual information is incomplete or lost, much of the fossil's scientific value is lost as well.

Yet even discovery, excavation and publication barely scratch the surface of a fossil's scientific importance. The greatest scientific value of a specimen often comes decades later, when researchers ask new questions and apply new technologies that earlier generations never imagined. A specimen that seems fully studied today may yield surprising new information tomorrow, but only if it is still available for study.

Delayed discoveries

Consider the iconic dinosaurs, including T. rex, Triceratops, Diplodocus and Stegosaurus, first collected more than a century ago. Early paleontologists could describe their shapes but had no way to dig deeper by peering inside the bones. Because those specimens were preserved in museum collections, later generations could revisit them with technologies that didn't exist when they were discovered.

Paleontologist Larry Witmer and his collaborators at Ohio University started using CT imaging 20 years ago to reconstruct the internal anatomy of historic dinosaur fossils without damaging them, based on how X-rays travel through specimens. Brain cavities, inner ears, air spaces, nerves and blood vessels became visible for the first time, revealing how dinosaurs balanced, heard, smelled and perceived their world.

Henry Fricke, Thomas Cullen and other geochemists have used isotopic signatures preserved in fossil teeth and eggshells to reconstruct dinosaur diets, migration patterns and body temperatures. This research has revealed how dinosaurs lived: what they ate, how they moved through ancient landscapes, and even how warm their bodies were.

More recently, molecular paleontologist Jasmina Wiemann and her collaborators have identified chemical traces preserved in fossil bone, eggshell and skin that reveal aspects of dinosaur biology unimaginable even a generation ago. Until now, paleontologists had no way to know details about metabolic rates and reproduction or the colors of skin, feathers and eggs.

In my own research I use microscopes to uncover the hidden stories preserved inside dinosaur bones and teeth. Thin sections of fossil bones reveal that dinosaurs grew more like mammals and birds than like oversized reptiles. Microscopic modifications to bones capture traces of ancient scavenging, and tiny signatures deep inside baby dinosaur bones indicate the moment of hatching.

None of these discoveries would have been possible if the original fossils had vanished into inaccessible private collections.

Shared natural heritage, on the auction block

Fossils are not static objects whose scientific value is exhausted once they are described. Their value grows as science advances, but only if future researchers can continue to examine the original specimens.

Of course, sometimes dinosaur fossils are rescued from obscurity through purchase and immediate deposition or donation to natural history museums. Some of the world's most important dinosaur fossils are accessible today because individuals, companies or organizations with the means to acquire extraordinary specimens recognized that they belong where scientists can continue to study them and where future generations can learn from them.

Purchasing a fossil in order to place it permanently in the public trust is fundamentally different from acquiring it as a private collectible: One expands access, the other leaves access uncertain.

But as fossil prices rise into the millions, museums increasingly cannot compete. The most significant fossils are no longer reliably entering public collections. Instead, they are becoming luxury assets whose market value supersedes their scientific value.

Dinosaurs belong to our shared natural heritage. They inspire wonder because they connect all of us to a world unimaginably older than our own. For me, the question raised by auctions like the one on July 14 of "Gus" is not who can afford to own these relics of the past. It is whether future generations have the chance to study and learn from them.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How much do you know about the king of the dinosaurs? Test your knowledge with our T. rex quiz!

Scientists have identified a new species of monkey that has orange lips and makes unique roars and snorting sounds. The distinctive monkey lives in a remote region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

It is only the fifth new monkey species to be identified in Africa in the past 75 years, and there might be more unknown monkey species in the region, scientists behind a new study suggested. Researchers named the newly identified species of monkey Colobus congoensis, after the region, and it is known by the common name "lik­weli" in the local Kilanga language.

"This is remarkable because it's not very common these days to find a new, never-before-documented primate species, let alone a relatively large species of monkey," said Joshua Linder, an anthropologist and president and co-founder of the The Forest Collective, a nonprofit that aims to conserve and restore tropical rainforests.

In 2008, conservationists in the dense rainforests of Lomami National Park, within the Congo Basin in the DRC, photographed an unidentified monkey, but it was partially obscured. Then, in 2018 a similar-looking animal was captured on camera, prompting study co-author Junior Amboko, a Lomami National Park researcher and a Florida Atlantic University anthropologist, to set out to find the mysterious monkey.

To see what was already known, Amboko and his colleagues showed the pictures to people from 52 villages around the park.

"These people really know the fauna and flora in the forest," Amboko told Live Science. "In only eight villages, people knew the monkey ‪—‬ and these were hunters, who know the economic value of animals or how much food each animal can provide, but even they didn't know much."

Hunters of the Balanga ethnic group called the monkey "likweli," although the meaning of this name isn't known. Some in the Mituku local communities called the species "kasaba nkoni," which Amboko said means "the branch shaker." This refers to the way colobus monkeys leap from branch to branch, Amboko said.

In their searches between 2018 and 2022, the researchers recorded 114 sightings of the species across an estimated range of about 660 square miles (1,700 square kilometers) naturally isolated between the Lomami and Lualaba rivers. They reported their findings July 15 in the journal PLOS One.

The monkeys, seen hanging out in groups of between one and 20 individuals, are mainly glossy black, but they have a conspicuous orange patch around the mouth and nose. Bare gray skin on their cheekbones makes it look as if they're wearing masks. They also have a patch of white fur around the anus.

"We're going with the face and the rump as the two distinctive traits," said study co-author Kate Detwiler, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University. "If you see the face, you see this unique bare skin that's orange cream. And then if you're coming from behind, you see this white patch."

The monkeys, which weigh about 15 pounds (7 kilograms), also make deep, loud roars, punctuated by distinctive snorts. These unique‬ vocalizations distinguish them from other colobus monkeys, Detwiler told Live Science.

By taking samples, and sequencing DNA, from monkeys killed by hunters and destined for the illegal bushmeat trade, and comparing the results with what’s in museum collections and datasets of genetics, skulls, teeth and pelts for other colobus monkeys, the team confirmed that C. congoensis was a previously unknown species.

"My lab got the tissue sample and did the genetics, and we were shocked by how divergent the key area of the mitochondrial genome was from other colobus monkeys," Detwiler said.

The monkeys live in the same forest as the Angola colobus (Colobus angolensis), but their closest relatives are black colobus monkeys (Colobus satanas), which live around 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) to the west, in Cameroon, Gabon and Bioko Island.

"The fact that the results show that the closest living relative to this new species is the black colobus located 1200 km away in West Africa is equally remarkable," Linder, who was not involved in the new study, told Live Science via email.

Detwiler estimates that these close relatives diverged between 5.78 million and 3.44 million years ago ‪—‬ the longest known split between species within the Colobus genus. "The discovery is reshaping our understanding of African monkey evolution," she said.

Given the small geographic range, rare sightings and increasing habitat loss, the researchers recommend that C. congoensis be classified as endangered on the IUCN Red List.

The discovery also emphasizes the importance of Lomami National Park, where another previously undescribed monkey, the lesula (Cercopithecus lomamiensis), was reported in 2012 by a team that included Detwiler.

The Congolian rainforest ranging across this part of Africa is the world's second-largest tropical forest, after the Amazon, and about 60% of it is in the DRC. "It is a paradise for biodiversity," Amboko said, adding that there might be more undescribed primate species there. "If we are able to discover two big new primate species, who knows how many other new mammals, fish, reptiles or plants there could be?"

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Scientists in Australia are deep-freezing koala eggs and sperm as a "genetic backup" to save the wild population from future extinction.

The backup could be used to create healthy koala embryos through artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization (IVF), the researchers said in a statement. When koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus) die, unique traits and diverse genes that may help them adapt to changing environments are lost, but the new project offers a way to store this valuable material, the team said.

"Losing genetic diversity can weaken future generations and decreases the ability of the species to adapt to challenges," Andres Gambini, a reproductive biologist at the University of Queensland who is involved in the project, said in the statement. "This project will create a safe and systematic way to rescue and preserve koala spermatozoa and eggs to support future conservation programs."

Australia is facing a paradox with its koalas. In some regions of Queensland and New South Wales, koala populations have crashed by as much as 80% since the late 1990s due to deforestation, bushfires, drought and disease. This prompted the Australian government to change koalas' conservation status in their eastern range from "vulnerable" to "endangered" in 2022.

Meanwhile, in parts of southern Australia, koalas are overabundant. However, the places where koalas are currently thriving may not be able to support a booming population much longer, because the animals are overbrowsing and killing the trees they need to survive, recent research suggests.

To protect against koalas' decline, the scientists will freeze koala reproductive cells in liquid nitrogen (LN2), which has a boiling point of minus 321 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 196 degrees Celsius). This method would enable the team to cryopreserve the cells for several decades until they are needed, said Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary developmental biologist and associate professor of biological sciences at the University at Buffalo in New York.

"I've successfully woken cells up that were frozen in LN2 a couple of decades ago," Lynch, who is not involved in the koala project, told Live Science in an email.

The sperm and eggs will be supplied by wildlife hospitals that will harvest sex cells from dead koalas or koalas that can no longer breed due to disease or trauma, according to the statement.

"Every year, many koalas are admitted to wildlife hospitals because of illness or injury and sadly, not all of them survive," Gambini said.

The researchers will then test the cells for Chlamydia pecorum, a highly contagious and deadly form of chlamydia. In koalas, this infection causes painful urinary tract infections, gastrointestinal issues, and conjunctivitis, which can lead to blindness. It can also cause infertility in females. C. pecorum is one of the main contributors to koalas' decline in recent years, with infertility driving a sharp reduction in the number of koala joeys being born. In the worst-affected populations, situated mostly in Queensland and New South Wales, almost 90% of koalas are infected with chlamydia.

If the reproductive cells contain C. pecorum, "we have the technology now to remove the infection from the samples," Steve Johnston, an associate professor of animal reproduction and captive husbandry at the University of Queensland who works on the koala project, said in the statement.

In 1998, Johnston was part of a research team at the University of Queensland that created the world's first koala joey born through artificial insemination. The new project also builds on a 2025 study, led by Gambini, that produced the first-ever IVF kangaroo embryos. (These did not result in live births; at the time, the scientists said that would take another decade.)

It's unclear how many sperm and egg cells the researchers plan on freezing, and it's hard to say how many cells they would need to ensure the survival of healthy koala populations, as the number of cells required is probably increasing with time, Lynch said. As koala populations shrink, genetic material is being lost at an accelerating pace, so the team will have to get more samples as time goes on to obtain the same amount of diversity.

The project does not replace more traditional conservation approaches — such as habitat protection, disease management and population monitoring — but researchers cannot afford to wait until populations are smaller and genetic diversity is harder to recover, Gambini said.

Although conservationists are concerned about the fast rate of koalas' decline, "there is a chance" that scientists can save the species through cryopreservation, Lynch said.

"I support multipronged approaches like this," he said. "By preserving the environment with traditional conservation we allow re-introductions because the species have somewhere to live."

On a Sunday afternoon in April, the main minibus terminal in Sukabumi, Indonesia, looked sleepy from the outside. But in an open space round the back, hundreds of men were gathered. Amid chatter and cigarette smoke, the air buzzed with excitement, for one of the region's biggest bird-singing competitions was set to begin, and a motorbike was among the prizes.

As the day progressed, dozens of songbirds were brought out for their 10-minute rounds, from tiny garden sunbirds and grey-cheeked bulbuls to larger oriental magpie-robins and orange-headed thrushes. Then the emcee announced the main event — the singing contest among the highly popular, strikingly handsome white-rumped shamas — and a hush fell over the crowd.

The shamas' owners murmured final words of encouragement and stepped away from their cages. Judges swept in with clipboards, assessing each bird for its song, ability to hold a steady tune, volume and showmanship. Soon it was down to a final two birds ... and then "Baby White" was crowned the winner amid cheers from the crowd.

Indonesians have a long-standing culture of keeping birds as pets, and songbirds are especially popular, prized by collectors for their melodious singing and colorful plumage. "I keep songbirds as a hobby, to relieve stress and also gain a bit of money," explained Harry Gunawan, a 78-year-old businessman and owner of 39 shamas, including the multiple prizewinning Baby White, while waiting for his new motorbike.

Gunawan's shamas are among an estimated 66 million to 84 million caged birds that are kept across Java, the island where 56 percent of Indonesia's population lives and one in three households owns birds. These include more than 3 million white-rumped shamas and 2 million oriental magpie-robins. Wild birds are believed to be better songsters; hence, many are trapped in forests then crammed into tiny crates, drainpipes and even plastic bottles, destined for pet markets in Jakarta, Surabaya and other big cities. Birds that survive the journey — estimates of mortality rates range from 30 to 80 percent — will spend the rest of their lives confined to cages.

This birdkeeping hobby, paired with the growing popularity of singing competitions, has already driven some species to extinction and many species — also threatened with habitat loss — are on the brink, a phenomenon dubbed "the Asian songbird crisis."

"The silent forest is really happening," says Agung Nur Haq, who is in charge of conservation at the Wak Gatak Songbird Rescue and Rehabilitation Center near Pontianak, West Kalimantan.

Experts warn that action must be taken quickly, or the consequences may be dire and irreversible. If nothing is done and populations can't recuperate, says Alexander Lees, a conservation biologist at Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom, we may experience an "empty forest syndrome," whereby forests appear intact and lush but are devoid of animals.

Birds in demand

The illegal bird trade is thriving elsewhere in southeast Asia, including Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. But "Indonesia's songbird trade is one of the world's most prolific," says Chris Shepherd, a wildlife trade expert at the Center for Biological Diversity in Canada. "It's terrifying."

The biodiversity-rich nation is home to about 1,800 bird species — more than double the number found in the United States. Of those, one in five have been spotted in pet markets, including protected, endangered and endemic species (ones found nowhere else). These include the endangered black-winged myna and the Javan green magpie, of which fewer than 250 and 100 wild individuals, respectively, remain.

Estimates suggest that up to 30 percent of Indonesia’s population, some 90 million people, keeps between 164 million and 187 million wild-caught songbirds.

"There may be more birds behind bars than left in the wild," wrote Lees in an overview of the songbird crisis in Current Biology.

The fondness of Indonesians for caged birds stems from a centuries-old belief among the Javanese, the country's largest ethnic group, that a man is considered successful if he possesses five elements: a wife, a house, a vehicle, a ceremonial dagger and a bird. The bird symbolizes that he is in touch with his softer side, and can indulge in both work and leisure. In a 2025 study, researchers found that a bird's singing ability was the biggest driver of demand — after that, people preferred rare, endemic or unusual birds that flaunt one's status.

Singing competitions emerged in the 1970s as another reason to keep songbirds. These local or regional events are typically held monthly or weekly, involving up to 1,000 birds.

"The owners go home with, at the very least, tons of prestige, but more often lots of prize money, sometimes up to 10 years' salary," says acoustic biologist Benjamin Mirin, founder of the Creative Conservation Lab with Cornell University. Competitors also stand to win exclusive trophies, goats, motorcycles and even cars.

Mirin, who has been studying the songbird trade since 2018, says the events can be life-changing. "They're so popular and financially beneficial that they're accelerating the poaching of birds to the point where now the forests are falling silent."

Unfortunately, wild-caught birds are perceived to have better song quality and a wider singing repertoire than their captive-bred counterparts. As a result, competitions "have been driving the demand in certain species," says Serene Chng, a wildlife trade researcher at TRAFFIC, a nonprofit focused on reducing harmful and illegal trafficking of plants and animals.

An expert group formed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature has identified 52 species that are most impacted by trade in Asia. These include the straw-headed bulbul (known for its lovely duets) and the Bali starling (with its stark white plumage and electric-blue eye ring). Although Indonesian law forbids the capture and trade of more than 500 bird species, many of them songbirds, enforcement is weak, thanks to poor resources, corruption and other factors. Consequently, several species, including the Javan pied starling, are now locally extinct.

It's hard to predict what will happen to ecosystems if songbird species are wiped out en masse in Indonesia. Birds play important ecological roles: pollinating plants, dispersing seeds and helping with insect control. The Pacific island of Guam offers a cautionary tale: It lost nearly all of its songbirds after the brown tree snake, which preyed on the birds and their eggs, was accidentally introduced after World War II. Guam's forests shifted to what Lees has described as "a nightmarish alternative state as a spider-dominated ecosystem." It was, he says, "pretty catastrophic."

Indonesia is much larger and far less isolated, so "your starting conditions are not as bad," says Lees. "But if we don't recuperate some of those populations, then we can expect maybe similar sorts of downstream impacts."

A sanctuary

Government agencies have had some success in tracking down wild-captured birds but are reluctant to confiscate them because they lack a place to house them. This dilemma in West Kalimantan province, a hotspot for illegal bird trade activity, led to the establishment of the Wak Gatak sanctuary by the nonprofit group Planet Indonesia.

One of its key aims is to provide suitable facilities to encourage more frequent confiscations and rescues by authorities with Indonesia's natural resources and conservation agency, BKSDA, while ensuring the welfare of confiscated songbirds, says Abrar Ahmad, a technical advisor for terrestrial conservation at Wak Gatak.

The center, which sits on a leafy plot near the city of Pontianak, is worlds apart from the dark, cramped conditions birds endure when smuggled aboard a truck or ship. On a morning in April, visitors turn off a sleepy road and drive past the gates down a short muddy track. Dragonflies flit lazily through tall grass and a smattering of coconut, banana and durian trees sway in the distance. The facilities are modest: a small office block with light-filled aviaries.

Animals often arrive at Wak Gatak in an alarming state: Malnourished, with missing feathers, many appear fatigued or withdrawn, says Happy Ferdiansyah, Wak Gatak's head veterinarian. Some birds have wounds on their upper beaks from gnawing on cage bars, while others — especially if they're more territorial — suffer leg fractures from fighting with other birds in close quarters.

"A lot of them, 70 to 80 percent, die within the first two weeks. Their condition is very poor," says Ferdiansyah.

To avoid causing the birds further stress, his team conducts only a visual inspection of the new arrivals. Those that are obviously ill are transferred to the on-site clinic for treatment. The rest are transferred to cages in quarantine.

The birds receive vitamins, nourishment (an assortment of fruits, insects, sugar syrup and so on), in addition to enjoying more space — one or two individuals typically share an oven-size cage. They remain in quarantine for at least 14 days, a critical time period when diseases such as avian influenza and Newcastle disease tend to manifest, says conservation director Haq. To test for these and other issues, Ferdiansyah and his fellow vets analyze blood and stool samples, in addition to carrying out rapid antigen tests.

Once their health has been given the all-clear, the birds are moved to rehabilitation aviaries on the opposite side of the premises. These enclosures are much more luxurious: bathroom-size, dotted with green plants, with generous views of the surroundings and sky.

Here, stimulation is key, as is getting the birds comfortable with flying again. "The aviaries have different perches and plants for the birds to hop around or to hide in the bush," says Ferdiansyah. "We also do food enrichment like giving them live insects or putting the food in different places."

Only some birds are fit for release. Those that appear habituated to people are not good candidates; they may continue to approach humans and might teach non-natural calls to wild birds or just fail to communicate with them. The center, for example, currently houses four locally endangered and protected common hill mynas — glossy black starlings with heavy orange bills that are renowned for their intelligence and mimicry. When I visited, the birds happily wolf-whistled, chuckled and offered the traditional Islamic greeting "As-salamu alaykum," among smatterings of Indonesian chatter. These mynas have been at Wak Gatak for nearly a year and will remain there for the foreseeable future.

But for birds that are suitable to release, the center works with BKSDA to identify possible sites. Ideally, these would be forest lands in good condition, with abundant food and water, minimal human activity and few natural predators like civets and snakes, says Ferdiansyah. A local community that's supportive of conservation is a plus — increasing positive outcomes, such as survival and reproduction, by 10 percent, according to a 2023 study that analyzed 305 wildlife restoration projects in 80 countries.

Once a site is determined and permits are secured, Ferdiansyah and his team transport the birds — as they did at the end of April, taking 130 birds to a nature reserve seven hours north of Pontianak. At such sites, the team carries out what’s known as a soft release, placing the birds in a large makeshift cage that allows them to acclimate to their new surroundings. After four to 10 days, the team opens the cage, allowing the birds to fly away when ready. Team members stay on for up to two weeks, tracking the birds to make sure they're settling in problem-free.

It's rough, sweaty work, says Ferdiansyah, but highly rewarding. The center has so far helped 348 songbirds return to the wild. The April release is their largest to date, and included some crimson sunbirds and greater green leafbirds, the latter of which is endangered. Another 705 birds were seized in December from a ship at the local port in Pontianak. Within hours, most of the birds had died. But 36 are still recovering at Wak Gatak and 22 have been rehabilitated and released.

Nearly 3,000 birds from 45 species have passed through the center's doors since it opened in 2022. It’s proof that such a rehabilitation facility — the only one in Indonesia for the foreseeable future — can make an impact.

But given how many songbirds are in peril, its work is a drop in the ocean.

To slow the crisis, experts say it must be fought on multiple fronts, but above all, at its root: demand. It requires "thinking about how we can shift attitudes and behaviors to reduce pressure on wild populations," says Lees, who explores such measures in a look at the state of the world’s birds in the 2022 Annual Review of Environment and Resources. In 2023, the Wak Gatak team carried out a campaign across some of the city's billboards, discouraging people from joining songbird competitions. And in the coming months, they'll host a series of behavior-change workshops in two towns close to forests where birds are commonly poached and competitions are growing in number.

Shifting the needle will not be easy. Indonesia's songbird hobbyist groups are powerful — in 2018, they successfully petitioned to have five species downlisted from the national list of protected birds. Plus, government officials often take part in competitions themselves. In 2018, for example, then-president Joko Widodo presided over the President's Cup, one of Indonesia's most prestigious songbird competitions, even entering his own white-rumped shama.

Yet change is possible: Ferdiansyah himself kept four songbirds as a kid because they "sounded very nice" and he thought he could make them happy. But when he entered veterinary college, he realized the error of his ways and set the birds free.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Sign up for Knowable Magazine's newsletter.

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The first dinosaur found in Antarctica belonged to a group that included the largest animals ever to walk the planet, a new study finds.

A backbone from the 82 million-year-old giant was discovered more than 40 years ago, but at the time, researchers assumed it came from an ancient marine reptile. Now a new study, published June 29 in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, has revealed that it was actually a titanosaur — the group of long-necked sauropods that included the largest land animals on record.

"At first glance this appears to be an unremarkable fossil, but it holds an important place in the history of Antarctic exploration as the first dinosaur fossil found on the continent," study first author Paul Barrett, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, said in a statement.

While this fossil now holds the record for the first dinosaur fossil found in Antarctica, other dinosaur fossils were identified on the continent after its discovery, so it's not the only known Antarctic dinosaur. In fact, researchers have identified a variety of dinosaurs on Antarctica, with another sauropod fossil identified as a titanosaur in 2011.

The newly identified dinosaur was around 20 to 23 feet (6 to 7 meters) long. That's very small compared with the largest-known titanosaurs, which could grow up to 123 feet (37.5 m) long. However, as the fossil is just a fragment of a vertebra, researchers are unable to narrow down which species the Antarctic titanosaur belonged to, and it's possible that the individual was only a juvenile when it died.

Mike Thomson, a British Antarctic Survey geologist, found the fossil during an expedition to James Ross Island in 1985. The island, which has been the site of multiple dinosaur discoveries, is located off the northeastern Antarctic Peninsula, south of the 600-mile-wide (965 kilometers) Drake Passage that separates South America from Antarctica.

Antarctica is well known for its icy landscapes, but when titanosaurs roamed Earth, the continent was still attached to South America and full of temperate forests. Antarctica's dinosaurs were so far south that they would have lived in constant twilight during the winter months, according to a news article published by the Natural History Museum.

The authors of the new study identified the dinosaur using high-resolution CT scans, which enabled them to look inside the fossil. Dating back to the Cretaceous period (143 million to 66 million years ago), the titanosaur lived in the last age of the non-avian dinosaurs, before an enormous asteroid hit what is now Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago and wiped them out.

The Antarctic titanosaur helps researchers better understand how dinosaurs spread across Earth's southern continents, which at the time were combined into a supercontinent called Gondwana. The presence of titanosaurs on Antarctica suggests that they may have used Antarctica to travel from what is now South America to New Zealand.

Other dinosaurs identified on Antarctica include small herbivores, armored ankylosaurs and bipedal predators like Imperobator, which would have shared the forests with the newly identified titanosaur. While researchers are beginning to piece together Antarctica's ancient ecosystems, they still have a lot to learn about the dinosaurs that lived there.

"There are likely many more dinosaurs to be discovered on the continent," Barrett said. "As climate change causes ice to retreat we may indeed find further evidence of this past biodiversity."

Plants, insects, and larger animals, like the forest’s white-faced capuchin monkeys, are well adapted to these changes. But in 2015, during an abnormally severe drought influenced by the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Perry, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, observed behaviors that once seemed impossible.

Under normal conditions "The [capuchin] mothers are quite devoted," she explained. "Now, I was seeing babies crying on the ground piteously. And the mothers just looking down like 'Too much trouble' and walking off, abandoning their infants."

"Even capuchins have their limits," Perry said. "And we need to start paying attention because all the weather predictions are saying that we're going to get more unpredictability and more climate extremes."

Monkeying around

Odd Jacobson, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, was a student at Lomas Barbudal in 2016, a year after this severe drought. His focus was on understanding how the study site's 12 different capuchin groups were moving through the forest. But now he's set out to investigate how else climate extremes may affect the behaviors and social structures of these monkeys.

In a paper published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, Jacobson and his coauthors — including Perry — analyzed how climate variability correlated to the 33 years of geolocation data they had on the capuchins.

Their first step was understanding how the size of each group was affecting the relationships between monkeys within the same group. To do this, they observed variables such as daily fruit intake, the size of the group's home range, and the distance the group traveled each day to find food.

Finally, to understand how monkey groups interacted, they used a "hierarchical social relations model," which allowed the scientists to predict how two different monkey groups would move through the forest and where their territories would overlap.

The team repeated this process, two monkey groups at a time, until they analyzed the interactions between all 12 monkey groups at Lomas Barbudal. Then, they added the climate-over-time layer to predict how the home range overlap and encounter rates (meaning moments where capuchins from two different groups engaged, often violently) would change with the seasons.

Strength (and weakness) in numbers

Generally, large monkey groups have advantages and disadvantages in the forest. One key advantage is the ability to control resource-rich areas, such as land with fruiting trees known as food patches. A key disadvantage is increased intragroup competition for food, meaning the daily fruit intake of individual monkeys was lower.

The researchers found that during climatic extremes, such as extremely wet or dry seasons, this intragroup competition intensifies, making the group less efficient at foraging overall. Behavior between groups changed with the climate as well. For example, in a typical dry season, large groups often overpower smaller ones to take over areas with more available fruit, such as along rivers.

But the new research found that this long-understood idea doesn't always hold true: During extreme climate events, like a dry season made even drier by the effects of El Niño, capuchins didn't try to hoard the higher-quality areas.

"We don't really know exactly why," Jacobson said. "Maybe there's not as much heterogeneity in the landscape during these resource poor times, and so there's not much that larger groups can monopolize."

Climate extremes, the research suggests, may be upsetting the balance that determines the optimal size of monkey groups. And, as a warming atmosphere makes climate extremes like El Niño or La Niña more intense, it's growing increasingly important to understand how these changes will affect animal societies.

Filippo Aureli, an ethologist at the Universidad Veracruzana, in Mexico, was not involved with this study, but he has studied the effects of extreme weather events on spider monkeys in Mexico. He also registered the infant mortality rates of capuchin and spider monkeys in the Costa Rican dry tropical forest during that 2015 drought. Capuchin populations experienced high infant mortality during the extreme event, while spider monkey populations tended to stop reproducing.

"With climate change, [climate extremes] are going to be more frequent and intense," Aureli said. "And we don't know what's going to happen. For this period [so far], they've held on very well, the spider monkeys, but we don't know for how much longer."

Perry agreed, noting "the importance of having a baseline when you're trying to study rare events like El Niño droughts."

"We know what normal is," she explained. "If you just try to drop in right now in all the chaos that we're starting to feel around the planet, then you really can't study it."

This article was originally published on Eos.org. Read the original article.

An isolated population of sperm whales in the Mediterranean Sea are splitting into two distinct groups with different dialects, a new study reveals. This shift has likely been happening for thousands of years, as two groups split from an initial single population.

The findings, published Tuesday (June 23) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, are providing a rare insight into the process of different dialects emerging among non-human species.

The sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) live in small social units of females and young, and they associate with other groups in the same area. They use social vocalizations called codas ‪—‬ shortpatterns of clicks ‪—‬ to communicate. The particular codas they use identify them as being part of the same cultural group.

Taylor Hersh, a researcher in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol in the U.K. and first author of the research, and her colleagues have analyzed codas recorded over almost 20 years in the Mediterranean, where there is a unique population of a few thousand sperm whales, to see if they all use the same dialect.

Sperm whales entered the Mediterranean via the Strait of Gibraltar about 20,000 years ago, and they have spread throughout the area. The whales rarely leave the sea ‪—‬ even males, which normally migrate. Other sperm whales don't seem to enter often, either, so the Mediterranean ones are effectively isolated from other populations and are considered an endangered subpopulation.

"The sperm whales in the Mediterranean are really cool," Hersh told Live Science. "I've always thought of them as the weirdos of the sperm whale world in that they don't leave through the Strait of Gibraltar even though they could. They are unique, and for a long time, they were also thought to be acoustically unique."

The thinking was that all the sperm whales in the Mediterranean belonged to the same clan, identified by their use of a single coda 90% of the time. This coda consists of three clicks and then a pause before the fourth and final click ‪—‬ a pattern called the three-plus-one type.

But the analysis by Hersh's team of 5,291 codas recorded between 2003 and 2021 revealed that sperm whales living in the eastern Mediterranean around the Hellenic Trench, off Greece, have a slightly different dialect from that used by animals in the western basin around Spain's Balearic Islands.

The eastern whales produce a distinct form of the three-plus-one coda. "It's a very similar pattern of clicks, but it's much, much faster," Hersh said.

In some recordings, whales in the eastern Mediterranean produced the slower coda, showing they were familiar with both dialects.

"The western sperm whales religiously stick to their dialect, but there were four instances of eastern whales using the western dialect," Hersh said. "The question of why is still an open one. Their dialect seems to be a lot more diverse than we expected. They do occasionally make those slow three-plus-one codas, but they make a lot of other coda types, too."

Hersh hopes further recordings alongside records that tie individual whales to sounds and events might help elucidate why the whales switch between dialects.

"It's exciting to see this study showing different populations behaving closely, but also differently," said Gašper Beguš, linguistics lead at Project CETI, a nonprofit organization that aims to translate the communication of sperm whales.

The study paints a picture of sperm whales progressively occupying the Mediterranean from west to east, with the dialect of one group gradually changing. "The groups in the east clearly remember the western dialect because they have these 'throwback' days," Hersh said.

It's still a mystery how and why these dialects evolved.

"Every speech is a dialect; the question is how did they arise and why?" said Beguš, who wasn't involved in the new study. He said the historical change in habitat does help to show which dialect came first. "In the Mediterranean, maybe they're forming different groups, so that's why they're trying to distinguish themselves," he told Live Science, giving the parallel of young people who distinguish themselves from previous generations by coming up with new slang.

"It's possible that these two groups with repertoires that are very similar but still distinctive could represent a sort of midway phase,” Ellen Jacobs, a marine biologist at Aarhus University in Denmark who wasn't involved in the research, told Live Science via email.

"Changes in the rhythm might be a very feasible and meaningful way for coda signals to start to diverge," she said, like the way the English words "How do you do?" got mashed together until they morphed into "howdy."

The timescale on which a sperm whale dialect develops is uncertain, but it's likely a slow process, according to Hersh. "It's probably happening on the scale of hundreds and thousands of years, because sperm whales can live into their 60s and 70s. And this study is looking over 19 years of data, and that's just a snapshot of one animal's life," Hersh said.

This means the eastern whale dialect was conceivably emerging in the Mediterranean Sea as famous human civilizations were speaking different languages on the surrounding lands, including when the ancient Greeks and Romans were rising and then falling.

"Maybe if we could leave them for another 10,000 years, we would come back to find the completely separated dialects of clans," Jacobs said.

Researchers have identified a new species of "walking shark," a rare group of small carpet sharks that use their fins to "walk" along shallow reefs.

A team of divers spotted the newfound shark, which they named Hemiscyllium dudgeonae, in the dark waters around the reefs of southeastern Papua New Guinea. Gliding along the rocks was a small, brown-spotted shark that they didn't recognize.

"I was so excited. … I didn't look very closely at the pattern and quickly caught it and took it back to the boat," Christine Dudgeon, a senior research fellow at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia, told Live Science in an email.

Dudgeon handed the shark to Jess Blakeway, a doctoral student and first author of a new study describing the shark. Blakeway "noticed that the shark had a different pattern to the one that we were looking for and called out to me: 'Chris, it's different.'"

The new shark is named the Dudgeon's walking shark after Dudgeon, in recognition of her 20 years of researching the Hemiscyllium genus.

The new find, described June 15 in the Journal of the Ocean Science Foundation, brings the number of known walking shark species to 10, each with their own unique body pattern.

"This discovery is exciting because a lot of new fishes, and in particular, new shark and ray species, tend to be deep sea, so finding something in very shallow [less than 3 feet, or 1 meter] of water is unusual and highlights that there is potentially a lot of biodiversity that we really don't know about," Dudgeon said.

Encountering a new species

The team had been searching for another walking shark species, called Michael's walking shark (Hemiscyllium michaeli), when they encountered the unusual shark.

"Michael's walking shark has leopard prints and Dudgeon's walking shark has small white dashes and brown dots all over its body," Dudgeon said. "But with only one specimen we were not sure if this was an anomaly or a true difference."

The researchers continued surveying nearby reefs, and within two days, they had located 11 additional Dudgeon's walking sharks across three sites. These included males and females, both juveniles and adults, with all displaying the distinctive body pattern. That consistency convinced the team that they were likely looking at an undescribed species.

Dudgeon and Blakeway used genetic data to test this hypothesis at their laboratory in Australia. By comparing DNA from the newly discovered sharks with genetic samples from the other nine walking shark species, they confirmed that the population represented a new species.

Walking on land

Walking sharks are notable for their unusual biology. Unlike larger, open-ocean shark species, walking sharks spend their lives near coral reefs. Their ability to "walk" across the seafloor using their pectoral and pelvic fins is particularly useful during low tide, when parts of the reef become isolated from deeper waters. "Walking" helps the animals remain active when oxygen levels drop so that they can continue hunting prey across reef flats.

Scientists think this ability evolved as a response to the challenging environment of tropical reef flats, where oxygen levels can shift dramatically as the tides rise and fall.

Studies indicate that some walking sharks can survive in low oxygen environments for hours, though more research is needed to understand how the sharks are able to do this, Dudgeon said.

So far, Dudgeon's walking shark has been documented at only three locations in Papua New Guinea. If future research confirms that the species has a highly restricted range, H. dudgeonae could be vulnerable to habitat degradation, climate change or overfishing.

Many walking shark species appear to stay close to the reefs where they were born, which limits their ability to recolonize damaged habitats. Species with small geographic ranges are often more susceptible to population declines because local disturbances can affect a larger portion of the total local population.

The discovery also shows how new shark species are still being found in regions that have received relatively little scientific attention. Dudgeon and her team plan to continue doing surveys in Papua New Guinea to study the new species in its home environment.

"I think many people are not aware of the wonderful diversity of sharks and their relatives, the rays, skates and chimeras," Dudgeon said. "Very few species are dangerous to humans and they are a wonderfully broad and eclectic group of animals. They continue to surprise and fascinate us."

How much of a shark fan are you? Find out with our shark quiz!

Pets form an important part of many people's lives, providing meaningful companionship. However, our pets can sometimes also be a source of unwelcome pathogens and diseases, particularly if they frequently roam outdoors.

We are ecologists and a veterinarian who study wildlife health and the movement of pathogens among wildlife, domestic animals and people. If you let your cat outdoors, or if outdoor cats visit your yard, our recent findings may be relevant.

Zoonotic pathogens are organisms that can infect both animals and humans. From a pathogen's perspective, humans are just another animal host. Wildlife is often emphasized as a source of emerging disease for humans because there are vastly more wild animal species than domestic animal species.

However, even if a pathogen is capable of infecting people, it needs a way to reach us. Humans share more zoonotic pathogens with domestic animals than with wildlife, because domestic animals live close to us. Pathogens benefit even further if they can infect a companion animal.

In our newly published research, we compiled data from more than 400 studies to investigate how a cat's lifestyle, whether they're mostly indoors, outdoor-roaming or feral, affects that cat's likelihood of carrying pathogens that can infect people.

Across this compilation, there were nearly 100 pathogens detected in cats that are considered zoonotic and capable of infecting humans. Familiar examples are rabies, Toxoplasma gondii, roundworms and Salmonella.

Our research

We found that outdoor-roaming pet cats had three to five times the odds of carrying a zoonotic pathogen compared with indoor-only cats. More surprisingly, cats allowed to roam outdoors had similar odds of carrying at least one zoonotic pathogen as feral cats. Outdoor-owned cats carried fewer types of pathogens than feral cats, but the same pathogens that infect feral cats can also infect owned cats.

These risks become a large-scale problem because pet cats that roam freely interact closely with people, wildlife and other domestic animals. Across the studies we reviewed, about 60 per cent of owned cats had unsupervised outdoor access; in some regions, that rate exceeded 90 per cent.

Roaming cats hunt, interact with wildlife or other domestic animals, and move through environments contaminated with pathogens and toxins. Research suggests that cat owners may underestimate hunting by around 80 per cent, meaning that many prey captures and animal contacts go unnoticed.

These interactions are not uncommon and not limited to so-called pest species. Single-country estimates of wildlife killed by cats run into the billions, with more than 2,000 wildlife species documented as prey for domestic cats.

Cats hunt animals that can carry zoonotic pathogens, including rodents, birds and bats, many of which would otherwise have little direct contact with people. Owned cats might bring home rodents carrying viruses, and there are documented cases of cats bringing rabies-positive bats into homes. A cat returning home with prey can therefore create a pathway by which pathogens circulating in wildlife populations reach people.

In addition, it is not only owners who are at risk. Outdoor cats defecate in gardens, parks, playgrounds and other shared spaces, potentially leading to high contamination rates. One study estimated that outdoor cats deposited more than 60 tonnes [60 tons] of feces per 10,000 households each year.

Depending on the parasite, feces can contain hundreds to hundreds of thousands of parasite eggs that can persist in soil or water for months to years, which can infect people or other animals that come in contact with those eggs.

What cat owners can do

The most straightforward intervention is also the most economical and humane: prevent unsupervised roaming. That does not mean denying cats access to the outdoors. It can mean building "catios" or enclosures, leash walks, supervised time outside or other forms of contained outdoor access.

Veterinary care still matters. Treating existing parasitic infections and vaccinating against diseases like rabies are essential precautions, even for indoor cats. Since neither vaccines nor anti-parasitic treatment cover the full spectrum of wildlife-associated pathogens, managing exposure remains the more comprehensive protective approach.

The free-roaming debate is often framed as a false choice: either cats roam freely, or they are deprived of a natural life. That framing is misleading and inconsistent with how we manage other companion animals.

We do not assume dogs need unrestricted access to roads, neighbors' yards or to hunt wildlife to have good welfare. Indoor cats and cats with supervised outdoor access can live healthy, enriched and longer lives.

Policies and strategies that address how and where owned cats roam outdoors can help safeguard biodiversity, feline and wildlife welfare and public health. That is the central insight of One Health, that the same choices that protect ecosystems can also protect the animals and people who share them.

This article was co-authored by David Lapen, who works for and receives research funding from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How much of a cat fan are you? Find out by taking our cat quiz!

This week's science news was filled with things missing and found, with the revelation of the first-ever deep-sea footage of the elusive goblin shark making waves in the press.

Goblin sharks (Mitsukurina owstoni) are mysterious, deepwater creatures that have not changed much since they first appeared on Earth 125 million years ago — making them "living fossils." But capturing a recording of the sharks in their deep habitats is exceptionally difficult, and they have previously been seen alive only after being hooked to the surface on fishing lines. Scientists recently filmed not one, but two goblin sharks: The first near Jarvis Island in the South Central Pacific, and the second 6,550 feet (1,997 meters) deep in the Tonga Trench.

If you like your elusive animals on the wilier (and certainly much cuter) side, we also reported on the first ever photographs of the dwarf fox, a species that was believed to be extinct but has been found near a highway in Cozumel, Mexico.

Elsewhere, archaeologists found a second cannonball from the 1836 Battle of the Alamo, meaning they now have one from each side of the conflict. And separate teams of archaeologists discovered the remains of a prehistoric man in Germany who may have been a human sacrifice and signs of a "prototype" Stonehenge close near the famous Stone Age monument.

If you got this far wondering if the "missing" news items were, well, missing, we also covered how a "cold blob" of absent heat in the Atlantic Ocean is shifting Indian summer monsoons, threatening over one billion people; the Texas-size chunk of ice missing from Antarctica; how an ancient chunk of the moon found in Africa hints at a calamitous lunar collision; and a bizarre viral infection that left a woman unable to recognize her own father.

California is scarily close to a major quake

'The system is critically stressed': San Andreas and San Jacinto faults scarily close to major earthquake, study finds

The next major Californian earthquake could be closer than we thought, according to an alarming new study.

The research, based on historical modeling of earthquake activity, found that Southern California's San Andreas and San Jacinto fault systems are at their highest levels of tectonic stress in more than 1,000 years; while also being connected by a "gate" system that could make them rupture together.

The exact odds of each event happening and the timing of a possible future rupture are unknown. But the scientists stress that understanding how much strain is building up inside the system could help to prepare for whatever comes next.

Life's Little Mysteries

Why does it take our eyes so long to adjust to the dark?

Our eyes are remarkably adaptable, switching from navigating under bright lights to the near pitch-black of a moonless night. But anyone who's stubbed a toe during this acclimation window — and that definitely includes me — may have once or twice asked themselves why it takes our eyes so long to adjust to the dark. Live Science shed a bit of light on the question.

—If you enjoyed this, sign up for our Life's Little Mysteries newsletter

Physicists split a photon

'A mixture from zero to infinity': Physicists split apart a photon — and ended up with an improbable swarm of particles

What do you get if you split a photon? Anywhere from zero to an infinite number of more photons, physicists say.

That's the finding made by a new experiment that simulated a photon being sliced by a shutter under various circumstances, revealing the result was anywhere from zero to one to upwards of an infinite swarm of the tiny light particles. The probability of each of these states corresponded to how quickly the shutter cut the photon.

And the unexpected behavior has some truly profound implications for how we view fundamental particles.

Discover more physics news

—The world's first nuclear clock just ticked on — and it could help detect a fifth fundamental force of physics

—NASA's experimental X-59 jet breaks sound barrier twice, reaching Mach 1.4 in step toward 'quiet supersonic' technology

—Earth-based telescope shares image of Artemis II capsule near the moon — one of the farthest photos of humans ever taken

Also in science news this week

—'A completely different story': 300 million-year-old fossils reveal the first vertebrate land dwellers weren't what we thought, researchers claim

—Oldest known plague victims found in a 5,500-year-old burial ground in Siberia — and many of them were children

—Indonesia's near-identical, 'Twin Peaks' volcanoes form striking mirror image — Earth from space

—Lavish Roman villa discovered outside Rome's walls may have been frequented by Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius

—Neuroscientists are searching for the 'cellular substrate of loneliness'

Science Spotlight

'River in the Sky': China's doomed plan to create a 'cloud seeding corridor' tells us how far the country will go to solve its climate crisis

China's response to the climate crisis continues to astonish. Over the past two decades, the world's industrial powerhouse has presided over the largest and fastest clean energy buildout in modern history, while also working to bring its carbon emissions to a peak before 2030.

But an underdiscussed aspect of China's climate plans are its bold attempts to geoengineer the environment to be more resilient and better suit human needs. That's why, in his three-part "Taming Nature" series, Live Science's production editor James Price investigated the country's efforts to create a permanent atmospheric river and build the world's biggest dam in earthquake-prone Tibet.

Something for the weekend

If you're looking for things to keep you busy over the weekend, here are some of the best news analyses, crosswords, interviews, opinion pieces and quizzes published this week.

—A secretive Chinese probe has just arrived at one of Earth's 'quasi-moons' and will soon attempt a first-of-its-kind landing [News analysis]

—Dangerously hot and humid: Rising temperatures in the US make outdoor exercise hazardous [News analysis]

—'Is having two legs useful' in space?: Astronaut John McFall explains what life in orbit might be like for the first physically disabled person in space [Interview]

—'They reliably chose the statistically more favorable option': A crow researcher explains how these winged geniuses process numbers, and what it could reveal about human math smarts [Interview]

—Bow-Wow, Ding-Dong, Pooh-Pooh: Expert explains early theories of how human language evolved — and their silly names [Opinion]

—Rainforest quiz: Can you sort Earth's largest rainforests from biggest to smallest? [Quiz]

—Live Science crossword puzzle #48: Largest fish on Earth — 6 across [Crossword]

Science video of the week

Watch bison herd defend a newborn calf from wolf attack in a primeval Polish forest

European bison (Bison bonasus) are typically considered to be a non-prey species — only being hunted by humans.

But rare and unexpected camera trap footage from Poland's Bialowieza Primeval Forest (the oldest and best-preserved temperate lowland forest in Europe) has called that into question.

In the video, a herd of bison is recorded rallying around a newborn calf to fend off an attack from five wolves (Canis lupus), successfully driving the predators away. It's a nerve wracking watch, and one that could become more common as wolf packs grow in size thanks to a late 1980s hunting ban across the region.

Follow Live Science on social media

Want more science news? Follow our Live Science WhatsApp Channel for the latest discoveries as they happen. It's the best way to get our expert reporting on the go, but if you don't use WhatsApp we're also on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Flipboard, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky and LinkedIn.

A camera trap in an ancient Polish forest has captured extremely rare and unexpected footage of wolves attacking a bison herd made up of adults, youngsters and a newborn calf, a new study shows.

The event took place on Sept. 15, 2025. Five wolves (Canis lupus) enter the camera frame, closely followed by three bison cows and the newborn calf. In the footage, the cows chase after the wolves, leaving the calf alone and exposed. The wolves then surround the calf, bite its neck and try to drag it away, but two cows come to its rescue. The wolves return and seize the calf a second time in the background of the video — however, this time the entire bison herd comes to its defense to end the attack.

The clip is from the Bialowieza Primeval Forest, the oldest and best-preserved temperate lowland forest in Europe, which hosts the world's biggest population of European bison (Bison bonasus). The forest covers 350,600 acres (141,900 hectares) on the border between Poland and Belarus. There are more than 870 bison on the Polish side, according to the new study, while the Belarussian side has roughly 730 bison.

Also known as "the king of the forest," the European bison is typically considered a non-prey species, meaning it has no predators except humans. But the footage calls this into question.

"To our knowledge, we present the first video-recorded evidence of wolves attacking a European bison herd in the Białowieża Primaeval Forest," researchers wrote in the study, published May 29 in the journal Ecology and Evolution. "Although the video did not capture a direct kill, it suggests that other attacks on European bison could potentially be successful."

Historical documents show that wolf attacks on European bison used to be more common, with about 8 kills recorded annually in the Bialowieza Primeval Forest between 1840 and 1849. The forest was a popular hunting ground for monarchs from the 14th century onward, explaining why such detailed records exist.

European bison went extinct in the wild in 1919, but they were reintroduced in the Bialowieza Primeval Forest in 1952. The first confirmed bison kill since then dates to the mid 1990s, and after that, it seems as though wolves stuck to a diet of roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), red deer (Cervus elaphus) and wild boar (Sus scrofa), likely because these are much easier prey than bison, the researchers wrote in the study.

But now, "our observation demonstrated that the European bison is in fact a potential prey for wolves," they wrote. "This raises questions about why predation attempts are so rare, whether the bison can still be described as a non-prey species, and what this could mean for conservation and management of the species."

An intriguing trend in the Bialowieza Primeval Forest is that wolf packs are growing in size, possibly thanks to a late 1980s hunting ban. This shift could increase wolf predation on bison in the future, because bigger packs can handle bigger prey.

"If predation on European bison, specifically young animals, occurs more frequently than previously assumed, wolves could play a small but potentially important role in the natural regulation of bison numbers," the researchers wrote in the study. "In turn, such regulation could possibly lead to mitigation of human-bison conflicts."

Never-before-seen fossils of newly hatched crocodile-like creatures are shining new light on how our aquatic ancestors conquered land.

Early four-limbed vertebrates (tetrapods), which would eventually give rise to humans, took their first steps on land in the Devonian period, some 419 million to 359 million years ago, marking one of the most important periods in the evolutionary history of animals.

Now, a new study published Thursday (June 18) in the journal Science has revealed that these early tetrapods were less like amphibians and more like us. Rather than having a tadpole phase in their development, as many amphibians do today, new evidence suggests that they were direct developers — growing from smaller to bigger versions of themselves, like their ancestors, humans and many other animals.

The study is an important contribution to our understanding of early tetrapods' reproductive developmental biology, said Tim Smithson, a visiting academic at the University of Cambridge who specializes in early tetrapods but was not involved in the study.

It suggests that the "earliest tetrapods that took those first steps on to land were able to rely on the successful reproductive and developmental strategies of their forebears," Smithson told Live Science in an email. "Direct development made life easier — one less thing to worry about!"

The new research was based partly on fossils from early land-dwelling predators called embolomeres. These animals looked like a cross between a crocodile and an eel and ruled river, lake and swamp habitats 350 million to 280 million years ago, during the Carboniferous and Permian periods. While these creatures could grow to more than 10 feet (3 meters) long as adults, the study unveils rare fossils from Mazon Creek, near Chicago, that preserved embolomeres as hatchlings that were days to a couple of weeks old.

"These are intimate details of the first moments of these animals' lives, and we've never seen that before for this entire part of the evolutionary tree," study co-author Jason Pardo, a postdoctoral fellow of evolutionary biology at Vilnius University in Lithuania and a research associate at the Field Museum in Chicago, told Live Science.

These fossils didn't show evidence of external gills and other tadpole-like features that the researchers would have expected from an early land dweller. The researchers then checked other fossils from before and during the "fin-to-limb transition" but found no evidence of an amphibian-like life cycle in those, either.

"For as long as we've understood evolution, we've assumed this story of how we made that transition from water to land," Pardo said. "We in fact have a completely different story."

Science upended?

A statement released by the Field Museum claimed that the study upends scientists' understanding of how animals conquered the land. However, the experts Live Science spoke to disagreed with this assertion.

"The Mazon Creek material is wonderful, the study is interesting and the interpretation of the fossils is sound, but I don't think the results are terribly surprising," Per Ahlberg, a professor of evolutionary organismal biology at Uppsala University in Sweden, told Live Science in an email.

Ahlberg, who was not involved in the new study, specializes in the early evolution of tetrapods. He noted that scientists knew some early tetrapods had a larval stage similar to that of modern salamanders ‪—‬ namely, those belonging to the group Temnospondyli, which he described as the ancestral stock of modern amphibians. However, he contends that this didn't mean scientists assumed every early tetrapod was the same.

"Nobody has been arguing in recent years that ALL early tetrapods had such a larval stage or that this was essential for enabling the transition to land," Ahlberg said. "I mean, I have been working right at the core of this research field for 40 years and I have never given it any thought."

In response, Pardo agreed that specialists in the field recognized that the data didn't support that early tetrapods had an amphibian-like development. However, he argued that even among specialists, assumptions were still made about metamorphosis — a major developmental transition, like a tadpole transforming into a frog — and amphibian-like bodies.

"Onto something big"

Study co-author Arjan Mann, an assistant curator of early tetrapods at the Field Museum, first saw the study's first baby embolomere fossil during a 2016 trip to the Field Museum while working on his doctorate. At the time, the fossil was a mystery.

Mann and Pardo mused over the fossil's identity for years before high-resolution scans with scanning electron microscopy at the Canadian Museum of Nature confirmed that the ancient creature was an embolomere, according to the museum's statement.

"I think Jason and I both knew we were onto something big, since fossils of this kind of animal and from this phase, and developmental state in early tetrapod evolution have never been found or studied before," Mann told Live Science in an email.

Along with the embolomeres, the researchers looked at megalichthyid fish from before the land transition and limbless, snake-like creatures known as aistopods from during the land transition. All showed signs of direct development, they said.

"I think the take home message of this study is that we should always challenge conventional wisdom in science, especially when these older ideas do not have substantial backing," Mann said.

Camera traps from inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone reveal how the occupation of Russian forces at the site in February and March 2022 altered the behavior of wildlife living in the area.

After the invasion, which involved significant armed conflict inside the exclusion zone, mammals like deer and horses became less active and spent less time moving around at night, a new study reports.

Researchers discovered the changes by comparing footage from camera traps collected during the early months of Russia's 2022 invasion with recordings from the same period a year earlier, before the conflict began. The findings, published Thursday (June 18) in the journal Science, offer a rare glimpse of how animals respond to the immediate disruption caused by warfare.

"I wish the opportunity to analyze how the unfolding invasion affected wildlife ha[d] never happened," Svitlana Kudrenko, who conducted the study as part of her PhD at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg in Germany, told Live Science in an email. "Unlike in preindustrial times, current interstate conflicts are highly detrimental for wildlife because of a long list of warfare, often operated remotely."

The study took place in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, a roughly 1,000-square-mile (2,600 square kilometers) area surrounding the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Following the reactor explosion, authorities evacuated the region and restricted most human activity. Over the decades, with little to no human activity, wildlife populations have flourished, turning the zone into a natural laboratory for scientists studying ecosystem recovery and animal behavior.

But in February 2022, Russian forces seized control of the region during the beginning stages of the invasion of Ukraine. Military vehicles, troop movements, weapons being fired and other wartime disturbances suddenly transformed one of Europe's most unusual wildlife refuges into an active war zone.

To investigate the impact, researchers analyzed data from camera traps already operating in the exclusion zone from 2020 to 2022. Studying the ecological effects of armed conflict is difficult because war zones are dangerous and often hard for researchers to access.

By using the existing network of automated cameras, the scientists captured wildlife responses that would have been impossible to record otherwise. In total, the team analyzed almost 2,000 photographs and videos from the exclusion zone to build a picture of behavioral changes in response to the conflict.

The images and footage revealed responses from 11 wild mammal species, ‪showing that some animals changed their behavior during periods of heavier fighting.

Several mammal species — including roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), red deer (Cervus elaphus), moose (Alces alces) and red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) — were less active during the occupation than before the conflict, especially at night, the team reported.

The findings suggest that the impact of conflict can ripple through entire ecosystems. While Russia no longer occupies the Chernobyl exclusion zone, the authors highlighted that this study still shows how animal behavior can adapt to warfare.

Camera traps could become a valuable tool for measuring the environmental costs of conflict and understanding how wildlife copes with sudden human disturbances across the globe, the researchers added.

"Our study highlights the need to develop and implement research and conservation strategies focusing on armed conflict impacts on wildlife and environment in general, especially in areas of conservation importance," Kudrenko said.

What do you know about the animal kingdom? Test your knowledge with our animal quiz!

Corvids, including ravens and crows, have earned a reputation for being some of the smartest birds on Earth. They can recognize human faces, use tools, solve multistep puzzles and even hold funerals.

In recent years, scientists have added another surprising skill to the list: a grasp of numbers. Research suggests that corvids can distinguish between different quantities and, in some cases, even perform statistical analysis.

These discoveries have raised a provocative question: How deep do the roots of mathematical thinking go? While modern humans are the only known species to develop formal mathematics, studies of crows, monkeys and other animals suggest that the cognitive building blocks of math may have evolved hundreds of millions of years before people began doing calculations.

Few researchers have done more to uncover these abilities than Andreas Nieder, a professor of animal physiology and the director of the Institute of Neurobiology at the University of Tübingen in Germany. By examining the neural activity of both monkeys and crows, Nieder has found evidence that very different animal brains can process numerical information in surprisingly similar ways. Live Science spoke with Nieder about how these findings may reveal that the origins of mathematics are far older than our species.

Kenna Hughes-Castleberry: How did you get into researching crows and primates?

Andreas Nieder: After studying the auditory and visual systems for several years as a student, I realized that I wanted to focus on the neuronal foundations of intelligence and cognitive control functions. How does the brain give rise to abstract concepts, working memory, or the ability to follow complex rules deliberately? Of course, to study intelligence, you need intelligence specialists. I therefore began working with primates ‪—‬ more specifically, rhesus monkeys, arguably among the most intelligent mammals. They are closely related to humans, possess relatively similar brains, and share many cognitive abilities with us.

However, as a trained biologist, I was always interested in a broader evolutionary question: Are sophisticated cognitive abilities unique to mammals, or can they emerge in very different brains? Crows provided an ideal comparative species. Birds diverged from mammals more than 360 million years ago — roughly six times longer ago than the extinction of the dinosaurs. Yet despite this immense evolutionary distance, corvids display remarkably flexible behavior; in many ways, they are the feathered primates of the air.

KHC: Are crows difficult to study? Are they fun? Do they have personalities?

AN: Both primates and crows are demanding to study. Because they are highly intelligent, they require special housing and care. Since we investigate cognitive abilities under tightly controlled experimental conditions, they also require extensive behavioral training by skilled personnel. And, of course, the regulations governing research with these species are particularly strict.

At the same time, they are fascinating research subjects. Individual monkeys and crows differ noticeably in temperament and behavior. Some are curious and adventurous, others are cautious and reserved, and some learn new tasks much faster than others.

Their qualities can be quite striking. Some are reliable, highly motivated workers that perform consistently day after day. Others are sensitive divas who seem to require special treatment before they are willing to cooperate. Researchers generally avoid anthropomorphizing, but there is little doubt that individual animals exhibit stable behavioral traits that we would reasonably describe as distinct characters.

KHC: You've found that crows understand the concept of zero. How do we know this?

AN: We trained crows to recognize different numbers — sets containing one, two, three, four objects, and so forth. We then included trials in which no items appeared at all. The remarkable finding was that the birds treated an empty set as a quantity and as part of the numerical continuum. They behaved as though the empty set belonged before "one." Their error patterns were particularly revealing: They confused zero more often with one than with larger numbers, exactly as one would expect if zero were mentally represented as a numerical quantity next to one. In addition, recordings from neurons in the crow brain showed cells that responded selectively to empty sets. This suggests that zero is not merely a behavioral trick but is represented neurally as a meaningful numerical category.

KHC: To play devil's advocate, is the ability to recognize the difference between something and the lack of something really that surprising? Is it akin to the human concept of zero?

AN: That's an important question. Simply recognizing that nothing is present or absent is not surprising. Many animals can distinguish between the presence and absence of objects. The key issue is whether they treat "nothing" as a quantity that can be compared to other quantities.

Our experiments suggest that crows do more than detect absence. They position empty sets within an ordered numerical sequence, at the low end of the number line, and show distance effects similar to those observed with other numbers. For example, they find it easier to distinguish zero from two than zero from one.

That said, we should not claim that crows possess the full human mathematical concept of zero. Humans use symbolic zero in arithmetic, algebra, calculus and formal mathematics. What we have demonstrated is a foundational precursor: a nonsymbolic numerical representation of zero. This may represent an evolutionary building block from which more sophisticated human concepts eventually developed.

KHC: You've also found that crows can perform statistical analysis. Tell me more about these findings and what you showed.

AN: We trained carrion crows [Corvus corone] to associate a series of arbitrary visual signs, colored geometric images displayed on a touch screen, with different reward probabilities. One sign might yield a food reward 90% of the time, another 70%, another 50%, and so on down to 10%. Importantly, the signs themselves carried no inherent meaning; the birds had to learn these probabilities through experience.

Once the birds had learned these sign-probability associations, we presented them with pairs of signs and asked them to choose one. To maximize their rewards, they should select the sign associated with the higher reward probability. The crows did exactly that. Even when confronted with many novel pairings, they reliably chose the statistically more favorable option.

This does not mean that crows perform formal statistics in the human sense. They are not calculating percentages or solving probability equations. However, the results show that they can extract probabilistic regularities from experience, store this information in memory, and use it flexibly to make reward-maximizing decisions under uncertainty. These are fundamental ingredients of statistical reasoning and are highly valuable in natural environments, where animals constantly have to make decisions based on incomplete information.

KHC: Have researchers tried similar tests on babies or young humans, and if so, how do we stack up?

AN: Yes. Developmental psychologists have conducted many related studies with infants and young children. Even before learning language, infants show sensitivity to quantities, numerical differences and simple probabilistic information. By around 4 years of age, children also display an intuitive understanding of empty sets.

What is striking is that the behavioral signatures observed in crows resemble those seen in preverbal human infants and nonhuman primates. Of course, human children eventually develop symbolic mathematics through language, education and culture, which takes them far beyond the abilities observed in animals.

KHC: Can these findings tell us anything about how the human understanding of math evolved?

AN: They suggest that some foundations of mathematics may predate humans by a very long evolutionary timescale. Humans did not invent numerical intuition from scratch. Rather, we appear to have inherited ancient cognitive systems that allow brains to estimate quantities, compare numbers, and represent concepts such as zero approximately.

The fact that crows and primates — two distantly related groups — show similar numerical abilities suggests that these capacities may emerge whenever evolution favors flexible intelligence. Human mathematics likely built upon these ancient cognitive foundations and then expanded dramatically through language, symbols and culture.

KHC: What's something a general audience might be surprised to learn about crows?

Many people are surprised to learn that crows are songbirds. Most people associate songbirds with melodic singers such as nightingales or blackbirds, not with the harsh cawing of a crow. Yet crows do learn a significant part of their vocal repertoire and are even known as apt imitators, even of human speech sounds — the internet is full of funny videos in which crows imitate human speech.

What makes this particularly interesting is that their vocalizations are not merely reflexive calls. In our experiments, we found that crows can exert volitional control over their vocal behavior. They can learn to produce vocalizations in response to arbitrary cues and withhold them when required, demonstrating a level of cognitive control over vocal output that is considered an important prerequisite for complex communication and, ultimately, language.

More recently, we showed that crows can even use their vocalizations to count. In a recent study published in [the journal] Science, we trained crows to produce a specific number of calls — between one and four — in response to visual or auditory cues. Remarkably, they not only generated the correct number of vocalizations but also appeared to prepare the intended number before they started calling. This suggests that they can represent numerical information and use it to guide a self-generated sequence of vocal actions.

Taken together, these findings show that crow vocalizations are far more sophisticated than most people assume. Their characteristic "caw" is not just a simple call — it can be brought under deliberate cognitive control and even used to express numerical information. For a bird, that is a remarkably advanced ability.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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An elusive dwarf fox that was feared extinct has been photographed for the first time, after being spotted near a highway in Cozumel, Mexico.

The tiny animal was part of the mysterious Cozumel fox population, a potentially undescribed species that had not been officially sighted in more than 20 years.

Cozumel foxes live only on Cozumel, an island near Cancún. Researchers know very little about these mysterious predators, which are roughly 20% to 40% smaller than their gray fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus) cousins that live on the mainland.

Park and museum officials spotted and captured the fox in 2023 and, after a health assessment, released it back into the wild. Researchers have now shared the photographs and documented the encounter in a new study published May 4 in the journal Neotropical Biology and Conservation.

Although the rediscovery confirms that Cozumel foxes are still alive, they are likely on the brink of extinction, the study authors noted; the photographs highlight the need for focused research and conservation efforts.

"The biggest challenge facing the Cozumel fox is that we still know almost nothing about it, including its remaining population size, distribution, or ecology," study first author Travis Bayer, executive director of the conservation organization Pathos Wildlife, said in a statement. "That uncertainty alone is dangerous, because it makes effective conservation extremely difficult."

Cozumel foxes are an example of insular dwarfism, an evolutionary process in which larger animals, including fox-sized mammals, evolve to be smaller after colonizing islands, where there are limited resources and less space than on the mainland. The foxes aren't the only mammals that have shrunk on Cozumel over time; other examples include the island's critically endangered pygmy raccoons (Procyon pygmaeus) and dwarf coatis.

Archaeological evidence suggests that Cozumel foxes have lived on the island for at least 5,000 years, likely since before the arrival of the Maya within the past few millennia, and potentially for tens of thousands of years before that. Prior to this rediscovery, the last confirmed sighting of a Cozumel fox was in 2001, according to the study.

The rediscovery began with reports of a disoriented animal wandering near the highway on the southeastern side of the island. Officials with the Parks and Museums Foundation of Cozumel located and captured the fox, an adult male, on Sep. 14, 2023. They checked its health and later released the fox in the Laguna Colombia State Reserve, a protected area just south of where it was captured.

Recent and historical sightings suggest that Cozumel foxes could have an extremely restricted range in the island's South, where nature is increasingly threatened by development, land-use change, invasive species and natural disasters, the study authors noted.

The researchers recommended surveys to determine the current distribution and size of the Cozumel fox population, along with morphological and genetic assessments to establish its evolutionary status and conservation efforts to protect its assumed habitat in southern Cozumel and minimize human-wildlife conflict.

"Ultimately, we hope this work helps move the Cozumel fox from a little-known, uncertain presence on the island to a better-understood key part of Cozumel's ecosystems," Bayer said. "We also hope it demonstrates that conservation is often most urgent when certainty is lowest and that uncertainty itself can be a call to action."

For the first time ever, scientists have captured deep-sea footage of the elusive goblin shark, extending its known range far into the Central Pacific and down to nearly 6,560 feet (2,000 meters) below the water's surface.

The goblin shark (Mitsukurina owstoni) is a deepwater shark with an elongated snout and protrusible jaws that shoot out to snatch prey. The species, which has been around for about 125 million years, is described as a "living fossil." Until now, it had been seen alive only briefly, when it got hooked on fishing lines and hauled to the surface, according to a new study.

In the new footage, researchers documented two goblin shark sightings — one near Jarvis Island in the South Central Pacific Ocean and another at the Tonga Trench in the Southwest Pacific. Researchers suspect that goblin sharks live throughout the planet's oceans, as they have been caught in many different regions, but the specimen record is very sparse. So far, goblin sharks have been found only in narrow regions in the Atlantic and Indian oceans, as well as in small patches off the western U.S., Australia, Japan and Taiwan.

"The goblin shark is a deep-sea charismatic animal, and I never thought we'd see one alive," study co-author Alan Jamieson, the director of the Minderoo-University of Western Australia Deep-Sea Research Centre, said in a statement.

Not only was it fascinating to capture footage of goblin sharks in their natural habitat for the first time, but the specimen in the Tonga Trench was found swimming 2,300 feet (700 m) deeper than any other goblin shark, at around 6,550 feet (1,997 m), Jamieson said.

"On that expedition we filmed over 50 days of continuous footage between depths of 800 and 10,800 metres [2,600 to 35,400 feet] and this observation was a little over 20 seconds long which is [a] testament to how elusive this species is, and how special it is to have two observations in the same study," he said.

The researchers made the Tonga Trench observation in August 2024, while the Jarvis Island record dates to July 2019. The Tonga Trench shark was likely female and swam along the trench's northern slope, the team wrote in the study.

The Jarvis Island shark, on the other hand, was a male that was more than 11 feet (3.4 m) long and probably over 51 years old. It swam above an unnamed seamount at a depth of 4,058 feet (1,237 m), according to the study, which was published May 19 in the Journal of Fish Biology.

"New discoveries like this demonstrate that there is still so much to explore in our deep ocean home," study first author Aaron Judah, a doctoral student in biological oceanography at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, said in the statement. "Given the newly expanded geographic range of the goblin shark, this species can be included in regional management and a nation's biodiversity list."

Shark quiz: How much do you know about these iconic ocean superstars?

A single climate-change-fueled cyclone killed 7% of Tapanuli orangutans ‪—‬ the world's rarest great apes ‪—‬ in just four days last year, new research reveals.

The study shows that "climate change-driven weather poses an immediate, catastrophic threat to the world's rarest great ape," the researchers wrote.

Tapanuli orangutans (Pongo tapanuliensis) live in the Batang Toru forest in northern Sumatra, Indonesia. Pushed to the brink of extinction by habitat destruction, the entire species consisted of 767 individuals in 2019, of which 581 lived in the forest's west block.

Then, Cyclone Senyar arrived.

Across four days in November 2025, the rare and damaging tropical cyclone caused extreme rainfall and catastrophic landslides across this west block forest region, killing approximately 58 Tapanuli orangutans. These individuals died from drowning, suffocation under landslides, or impacts from collapsing trees, according to the study, which was published June 10 in the journal Current Biology.

The loss equates to 11% of the west block orangutans and roughly 7% of the whole species.

"It is extremely worrying for the future of this ape," study co-author Serge Wich, a professor of primate biology at Liverpool John Moores University in the U.K., told The Guardian.

World's rarest great apes

Tapanuli orangutans were classified as a new species, distinct from their Bornean (P. pygmaeus) and Sumatran (P. abelii) orangutan cousins, in 2017, making them the most recently identified, and rarest, species of great ape.

Orangutans are especially vulnerable to environmental shocks because of their slow rate of reproduction; they have roughly six- to nine-year gaps between each baby. They are also heavily dependent on tree cover to survive.

In the new analysis, researchers combined pre- and post-cyclone satellite imagery with orangutan population density estimates to evaluate the impact of the flooding and landslides on the apes.

Before the cyclone, 99.3% of the Batang Toru forest west block was forested. Then, after the storm's arrival, 21.8 inches (556 millimeters) of rain fell over four days, leading to landslides across 20,517 acres (8,303 hectares) of Tapanuli orangutan habitat. The researchers identified over 50,000 "scars" from this landslide-induced habitat destruction in the forest landscape.

This habitat loss was catastrophic for the orangutans. "Given the high density (>50,000) of sudden, steppe-slope landslides causing canopy collapse and debris flow into drainage networks, and the limited opportunity for arboreal [via trees] escape during rapid slope failure, we consider mortalities by burial, trauma, or subsequent drowning to be likely," the authors wrote in the study.

The long-term effects of topsoil destruction on the food supply will also harm the remaining orangutans, the authors wrote. With topsoil containing dense networks of plant-feeding fungi, it will take time for the fruit and leaves the orangutans rely on to return.

World Weather Attribution, a research group that studies extreme weather events, found that Cyclone Senyar was intensified by a combination of human-induced climate change, an ocean oscillation called the negative Indian Ocean Dipole, and La Niña, the cooler phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation climate cycle.

Climate change is projected to increase the frequency and intensity of heavy rainfall worldwide, including in Indonesia. And now that El Niño is officially here, the climate event will likely make the Pacific hurricane season stronger. This El Niño period is forecast to "rank among the largest El Niño events in the historical record going back to 1950," NOAA officials wrote in a June 11 update.

"El Niño conditions will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world," U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in a June 2 video statement. "The world must treat it as the urgent climate warning it is."

Frozen droppings of prehistoric ground squirrels are chock-full of DNA from ice-age beasts, including woolly mammoths, a mysterious big cat and a huge array of other organisms, revealing a remarkably detailed genetic snapshot of ancient life in Canada's rugged Yukon.

Although the genetic material of large creatures was found in the ground squirrels' poop, these rodents were not carnivores. They were opportunistic omnivores that feasted on a wide variety of plant material and fungi, as well as insects, rodents and carrion, just like Arctic ground squirrels (Urocitellus parryii) do today in the Yukon Territory and other parts of northwestern North America and Siberia.

But Arctic ground squirrels also have a habit of collecting and storing various objects in their burrows, which may have introduced additional DNA into the droppings over time, potentially explaining some of the genetic signals detected, the researchers cautioned. It's also possible that carnivores' DNA ended up in the burrows because they were attempting to prey on the squirrels, they added.

"The Arctic ground squirrels that are in the Yukon today act kind of like pack rats," study first author Tyler Murchie, a paleogenomics researcher with the Hakai Institute in British Columbia, Canada, said in a statement. "So they'll go into the landscape, and they'll collect a whole bunch of different bits of plant material and bones, seeds, and they'll bring it back to their burrow."

So whether these ancient rodents were feasting on carrion and other edibles or simply bringing it into their homes, these dropping help reveal the flora and fauna that lived in Beringia, an ancient region that once encompassed northeastern Asia and northwestern North America when the continents were connected by a land bridge during the last ice age. The findings were published Tuesday (June 9) in the journal Nature Communications.

Poop detectives

For the study, the researchers analyzed samples extracted from the poop pellets, which had been preserved for millennia in burrows within the deep permafrost of the Yukon, which borders Alaska. These droppings, the oldest of which date to around 700,000 years ago, have yielded an extraordinary treasure trove of ancient environmental DNA from numerous plant, microbial, fungi and animal species.

Notably, the genetic material from the 700,000-year-old ground-squirrel droppings ranks among the oldest DNA ever recovered and sequenced, according to the authors.

"The research shows us that ground squirrel coprolites, or droppings, preserve remarkably diverse genetic snapshots of ancient Beringia, making them exceptional repositories for understanding evolutionary and ecological change through the deep past," study co-author Hendrik Poinar, director of the Ancient DNA Centre at McMaster University in Ontario, said in the statement.

"It helps reconstruct paleoenvironments in much deeper time, providing insights into environmental change, megafaunal evolution, dispersal and ultimately extinction," Poinar added.

During their investigation, the researchers extracted ancient environmental DNA from a collection of ground-squirrel coprolites. This provided the team with sufficient quantities of well-preserved genetic material to reassemble more than 18 mitochondrial genomes, including those of woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), the now-extinct steppe bison (Bison priscus), horses (Equus), the snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus) and the Arctic ground squirrel itself.

A mitochondrial genome, or mitogenome, is the complete set of DNA found inside mitochondria — small structures located within cells that generate energy. The mitogenome assembled from the 700,000-year-old sample represents the oldest mitogenome ever recovered from ancient feces, the study reports.

The team also detected weaker genetic fingerprints from a range of other animals in the coprolites, including evidence of lemmings (Lemmus), caribou (Rangifer tarandus), gray wolves (Canis lupis) and a big cat — possibly a cougar or the extinct American cheetah (Miracinonyx trumani) — as well as fungi, bacteria and more than 200 groups of plants.

Given the rich archive of genetic material that has been uncovered, the findings could pave the way for future discoveries, according to the researchers.

"The thing I hope people take away from this kind of work is the unexpected mystery that you could find in remains that you might otherwise overlook," Murchie said in a video statement.

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Scientists have discovered a vast whale graveyard stretching for hundreds of miles in the Indian Ocean, with some fossil bones dating back over 5 million years.

The deep-sea "megasite," which the researchers have named the Diamantina Zone necropolis, is the most extensive accumulation of whale carcasses and fossils ever found, the researchers reported in a new study published Wednesday (June 10) in the journal Nature.

"It covers over 1,200 kilometers [750 miles], which just defies belief," Nick Pyenson, a curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., who wasn't involved in the study, told Live Science. "'Megasite' is a totally appropriate term. I think they've uncovered something really special."

"The density is crazy"

Xiaotong Peng, a deep-sea researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering, and his colleagues used an underwater vehicle called the Fendouzhe submersible to survey the seafloor in the Diamantina Zone, an area of ridges and fractures in the southeastern Indian Ocean.

After initially spotting one fossil, the team conducted 32 dives covering a survey area of about 0.25 square miles (0.64 square kilometers). In total, they identified 476 whale fossils and five carcasses of whales that had died more recently, known as whale falls, at depths of between 13,800 and 23,000 feet (4,200 to 7,000 meters).

Extrapolating from these figures, the authors said there could be seven to eight whale carcasses and about 750 fossils per square kilometer in the area.

The largest carcass is a 16.4-foot-long (5 m) skeleton from an Antarctic minke whale (Balaenoptera bonaerensis), the researchers said, but most of the remains are from beaked whales ‪—‬ marine mammals we know little about because they live in the open ocean and spend a lot of time diving.

The five active whale falls are covered in bacteria that live without light or oxygen and break down the oils in the whales' bones, producing hydrogen sulfide. This source of chemical energy enables the carcasses to host diverse communities of jellyfish, brittle stars, bone-eating Osedax worms and bivalve mollusks, which together reach densities of up to 2,840 individuals per square meter, the authors discovered.

Many of the members of the whale-fall communities may also be newly discovered species, the authors wrote, because although most could be matched to the genus or family level using DNA data from samples, only one could be confidently assigned to a species: a clam known as Abyssogena southwardae.

"The density is crazy, as is the fact that they're probably all new to science," said Stephen Godfrey, curator of paleontology at the Calvert Marine Museum in Maryland who wasn't involved in the study. "It's like each one of these whale falls is a new little restaurant that opens up in a 1,200-kilometer-long [745 miles] strip mall," he told Live Science.

These are the deepest whale-fall communities ever found, with the one at about 22,000 feet (6,700 m) being about 8,200 feet (2,500 m) deeper than any other known one, according to the study authors.

A fossil deposit being formed

Peng and his colleagues recovered 43 fossils and dated 33 of them based on the ratios of strontium isotopes present. The fossils belonged to five beaked whale species and one species of baleen whale, a group that includes bowhead and humpback whales.

The oldest fossil found in the area belonged to an extinct beaked whale in the Pterocetus genus that dates back about 5.3 million years, to the Early Pliocene. Another fossil find represented a new species, which the authors have named Pterocetus diamantina.

All that remains of most of the specimens is the bony upper jaw, or rostrum. These fossils came mainly from two species: the Andrews' beaked whale (Mesoplodon bowdoini) and the strap-toothed whale (Mesoplodon layardii). Both of these species still inhabit the Indian Ocean, but the fossils the team discovered could be up to 1 million years old.

"The really awesome thing is that this megasite is showing beaked whale ecology over geologic time scales, so you are getting extinct species overlapping the fossil remains of extant species," Pyenson said.

The megasite is analogous to either the famous Lagerstätte fossil deposits, where there is high-quality preservation, including of soft tissue, or to the Burgess Shale in Canada, which has a huge abundance of animals, Godfrey said, "only here, you have one that's still forming."

Beaked whales are rarely seen, so it might seem strange to find the remains of so many individuals in one place. But Godfrey said these animals might preserve better because of the staying power of their rostra, which have one of the highest known bone densities and mineral contents among living vertebrates.

This means they can persist long enough at great depths without being dissolved or consumed by bone-eating worms that they then become encrusted with ferromanganese oxides, solidifying and encasing the bone in a kind of natural sarcophagus.

"This seals the specimen in, so it will last in perpetuity, or at least over 5 million years, and who knows how much longer," Godfrey said.

Why so many dead whales?

The authors saw many squid and fish in the dives in the Diamantina Zone, which suggests the area provides an ideal deep-water foraging ground for beaked whales. This might mean more whales live and die in the area, even though when a whale dies, its decomposition can make it expand with gas and float on the surface for great distances before eventually falling to the seabed.

Peng and his colleagues also suggested that there might be an increased risk of death by beaked whales being tempted to chase prey below their maximum observed diving depth of about 10,000 feet (3,000 m), which puts them at risk of lung collapse or decompression sickness.

Another possibility is that the V-shaped topography of the Diamantina Zone may funnel sinking carcasses into a smaller area, the authors suggested.

"I think what they're dealing with is an analogue to the terrestrial tar pits or caves that are natural traps where biological remains accumulate over time," Pyenson said.

That's only part of the story, though. Normally, ancient remains on the seabed would get covered by sediment from eroded rocks, so we'd never see the fossils. But the sedimentation rate close to the Diamantina Zone is incredibly low ‪—‬ just 0.02 to 0.22 inches (0.05 to 0.55 centimeters) per 1,000 years, the study authors noted. This means skeletal remains could be exposed for hundreds of thousands of years at the flat bottom parts of the zone and for millions of years on slopes or uplifted sections, the team said.

They think there might be other similar "necropolises" off South Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and the remote Crozet and Kerguelen islands near Antarctica, where some fossils have already been discovered by trawling.

How much do you know about killer whales? Find out with our orca quiz!

On a blazing hot day in South Africa, female southern pied babblers can't think straight. The medium-sized black-and-white birds are trying to get at tasty mealworms behind a see-through barrier. On cooler days, the birds can quickly figure out that all they have to do is go around the small wall of plastic. But when the mercury goes up, the birds just keep stubbornly pecking at the barrier.

That experiment is part of a growing body of research showing that animals get their minds muddled during heat waves. When it's hot outside, birds struggle to learn, dogs bite more often, goat-like chamois pick fights. This is bad news not just for those who get on Fido's toasted nerves. If the animals can't stay alert enough to find food or avoid predators, their chances of survival go downhill, says Amanda Ridley, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Western Australia who coauthored the pied babbler study.

With climate change making heat waves more common, such cognitive impairments across the animal kingdom could ripple through entire ecosystems, putting already fragile species at greater risk. If pollinators forget which flowers to visit, crops and wild plants may fail. If birds can't find food as easily, their young may not survive. And on a warming planet, a sharp mind is particularly vital. "A changing climate means that your ability to behaviorally adapt is even more important," Ridley says.

Hotheaded

There is plenty of evidence that animals are affected by heat. Birds, for example, spend less time looking for food and feeding their young; they even sing less. Instead, they'll sit around for hours with wings spread to dissipate the heat, and pant with their beaks wide open. Some animals retreat to shade or hide in cool burrows — again, skipping meals. Bees, meanwhile, splash their faces with droplets of water midflight when the weather is sizzling. This way, "they get convective cooling for their brain," says Emily Baird, a neuroscientist at Stockholm University.

Some of the first hints that hot temperatures can mess up minds, however, came from studies on humans. Back in the 1800s, Belgian astronomer Adolphe Quetelet noticed that violent crime in France peaked in the summer. Later studies linked high temperatures with gun violence, mental-health-related hospital admissions, suicide and gambling. When it's hot, people have trouble making decisions, and their memory suffers. For students at schools without air conditioning, a school year just one degree Fahrenheit hotter reduces test scores by 1 percent, a study found.

Increasingly there's evidence that other species may also be more aggressive when mercury shoots up. A 2023 study that combed through nearly 70,000 reports of dogs biting people across eight US cities, from Chicago to Baltimore, found that such incidents were more likely to happen on hot, sunny and smoggy days. The risk was 10 percent higher on a 90-degree day than on a 60-degree day — and not only because people are more apt to venture out for walks when the sun is shining (the researchers controlled for seasonal effects in their data).

Still, the scientists were unable to determine whether dogs get more aggressive as it gets hot, or if cranky humans provoke more attacks. "It's likely that both humans and dogs get stressed and more irate at higher temperatures," said Clas Linnman, a neuroscientist at the University of Miami and a coauthor on the study.

And it's not only dogs: A 2025 study out of China showed that many animals, including snakes and cats, are more inclined to bite people when it gets hot.

Animals also seem to lose their cool with each other, especially if there is food involved. Scientists used binoculars and spotting scopes to spy on wild goat-like chamois that feed on protein-rich plants on the slopes of the Italian Apennine Mountains. More than 1,600 hours of observations over two summers revealed that when temperatures rose from 54 to 64 degrees Fahrenheit, vegetation grew scarcer, and chamois aggression in turn shot up. The animals became territorial over patches of food, they assumed threatening postures, chased each other — attacks that, at times, escalated. The study authors predict that chamois aggression will go up 50 percent by 2080 due to climate change.

The small tropical fish called a golden julie also gets confrontational in the heat. Ordinarily, when a golden julie is placed in front of a mirror, it sees its reflected image as a stranger and shows some hostility, raising its fin, for example. But if the normally 78-degree water is raised to a hot 84 degrees, the fish is more likely to get aggressive, and may bite and slap its tail against the mirror, as it tries to scare or attack the reflected image.

Cognitive problems

Heat waves can also hamper the ability of animals to learn, as Ridley and her colleagues observed with the southern pied babblers. In one of their experiments, the birds were presented with a simple wooden block with two holes drilled in it, each covered with a lid. If the bird pecked at the lid, it would rotate, revealing either an empty hole or a tasty mealworm (the babblers, Ridley says, "are highly motivated by mealworms"). One lid was dark, and the other a lighter shade of the same color. During heat waves, the birds needed twice as many trials to learn that the mealworm was always hidden under the lid of the same shade.

Another group of scientists tested zebra finches, pretty Australian songbirds, and discovered that if temperatures are high, they too have cognitive problems. When figuring out how to get a mealworm out of a see-through tube with an opening at one end, they would just keep pecking on the tube, says study coauthor Elizabeth Derryberry, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. It's the bird equivalent of "banging your head against a brick wall," she says.

Adding to the tally, several years ago researchers showed that when the heat is on, mice have trouble finding their way around a maze and forget objects they've seen the day before. More recently, researchers found that male guppies, popular aquarium fish, also have trouble getting through a maze after spending several days in heat-wave-like 90-degree water, even if the prize for getting it right is a virgin female — which they tend to find particularly attractive.

For animals such as fish and insects that can't control their body temperature, heat waves could be particularly detrimental. "Changes in air temperature will affect brain temperature," says Baird. A hotter brain could hinder the functioning of nerves, and that, she says, "might affect sensing, memory and learning."

When Baird and colleagues tried to teach bumblebees to associate sweet sucrose with the color blue and bitter quinine with yellow, most of the bumblebees learned the trick at 77 degrees, but fewer than half managed to do so at 90 degrees. Such impaired cognition could spell trouble in the field: If the insects forget which flowers they should pollinate (in the case of bumblebees, these include tomatoes and blueberries) or how to get back home with nectar, not only will the pollinators suffer, but human agriculture too, Baird says.

Heat appears to dangerously diminish animal vigilance as well. In Ridley's recent experiments, once mercury in the Kalahari Desert reached 96 degrees Fahrenheit, pied babblers lost their ability to properly respond to predators. In their studies, researchers lured birds toward a mystery shape covered in a sandy-colored blanket, using worms as bait. Once a babbler approached, the scientists would reveal what was hidden underneath: either a taxidermied cat-like carnivore called a genet, or a similarly sized and colored wooden box. The birds got scared of the genet in cooler temperatures — they'd call out, scan their surroundings, or simply flee. But once it got hot, they behaved similarly whether they were facing the carnivore or the box. Ridley suggests that this could translate into higher chances of fatal predator attacks as heat rises, which could harm populations of babblers and other prey species.

These studies are not just abstractions. In the Kalahari, where southern pied babblers use their wits to search for worms, temperatures are rising twice as fast as the global average. In tropical rivers, where male guppies seek mates, heat waves are growing longer and more intense. It's the same story across much of the planet — temperatures climb, and animal thinking becomes strained, potentially putting species at risk. The effects may be magnified in certain areas such as cities, which often exhibit even warmer temperatures than non-urban areas. If anything, Ridley says, "We are probably underestimating the impacts of increased heat on animal minds."

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Sign up for Knowable Magazine's newsletter.

The world's largest known scorpion lived at a time when other land animals were relatively small, around 415 million years ago in what is now the U.K., a new study finds.

The prehistoric creature, named Praearcturus gigas, is estimated to have grown to lengths of around 3.3 feet (1 meter) and was equipped with formidable pincers measuring roughly 6.2 inches (16 centimeters) long, according to a statement from the University of Manchester.

The scorpion would likely have been a fearsome apex predator that stalked floodplains during the Early Devonian Period, when life on land was still in its relatively early stages and dominated by small arthropods. Arthropods are now the most diverse animal group on Earth, as they include insects, crustaceans, scorpions and spiders.

The discovery that such a large scorpion was living 415 million years ago — long before the appearance of complex terrestrial ecosystems, such as forests — offers new insights into the evolutionary history of gigantism in arthropods.

"Confirming that this animal is a scorpion fundamentally changes our understanding of how and when these creatures evolved to such extraordinary sizes," study first author Richard Howard, curator of fossil arthropods at the Natural History Museum, London, said in the statement.

Remains of P. gigas, which have so far been recovered from places in England and Wales, were first documented in the 1870s, but researchers have long debated the type of animal it was.

"Praearcturus has puzzled us palaeontologists for more than a century," study co-author Russell Garwood, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester, said in the statement.

Researchers initially suspected that the remains represented a large woodlouse-like crustacean. Then in the 1980s, research suggested that the fossils instead belonged to a scorpion. But that interpretation was subsequently challenged due to the fragmentary nature of the known remains and a lack of the characteristic scorpion tail.

In the latest study, published Tuesday (June 2) in the journal Palaeontology, the authors re-examined key P. gigas specimens held in the NHM's collections using modern imaging and analytical techniques. They also compared them with other fossil material and recently described prehistoric animals that were more confidently identified as scorpions.

Their analysis indicated that P. gigas is likely a scorpion, and the team also reassigned several other specimens found in the same geological formation to the species, the study reported. Furthermore, the researchers suggested that the creature may have been at least partially aquatic based on the presence of flap-like structures known as epimera — similar to those which provide support and protection to the hard upper shells of lobsters and crabs — in some of the fossils.

"Without complex ecosystems to support Praearcturus on land, these animals probably spent part of their lives hunting in water," Howard said in a Natural History Museum statement.

A semi-aquatic lifestyle could partially explain the scorpion's greater size compared to its modern-day relatives, as water can support large bodies. But it also may reflect the relative lack of competition from other large terrestrial predators, potentially enabling it to reach sizes that would have been more difficult to attain had they been present.

"By bringing together material from several collections and using cutting edge imaging techniques, we've been able to build a clearer picture of the animal than was previously possible, which is really exciting," Garwood said.

"What makes Praearcturus so interesting is that it became enormous at a time when life on land was otherwise very small. But it was a world that could somehow support a giant predator."

A newly discovered feathered dinosaur with four wing-like limbs may have prowled the lakeside forests of what is now northwestern China, gliding between trees like a flying squirrel and snatching some of the earliest birds out of the Cretaceous sky.

The predator, named Jian changmaensis, was a close cousin of Velociraptor and belonged to a strange group of small birdlike dinosaurs called microraptors. Unlike the large and scaly "Jurassic Park" version of raptors, these animals were feathered, lightweight and glided to get around. Based on fossil evidence, J. changmaensis had long feathers on both its arms and legs, giving it the look of a tiny dragon with four wings.

The fossil, described Thursday (June 4) in the journal Annals of Carnegie Museum, is only a partial left shoulder and forelimb. But those bones were enough to reveal a new dinosaur species, and possibly solve a longstanding mystery at China’s Changma Basin, a site packed with ancient bird fossils and broken bird bones that look a lot like the pellets coughed up by modern owls.

"Our team has recovered more than one hundred bird fossils at Changma, but only this single non-avian dinosaur specimen," study co-author Matthew Lamanna, a senior dinosaur researcher and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, in a statement.

"[Microraptors] provide a window into what the closest ancestors of the first birds were probably like," he told Live Science via email. "Studying them yields clues as to how birds got their start and how they learned to fly."

Finding a fossil among the fragments

Paleontologists uncovered the fossil in the Lower Cretaceous Xiagou formation near Changma village in the Gansu province. The rocks there were formed during the early Cretaceous period about 124 million to 120 millions ago, when the region held a large lake teeming with birds, fish, turtles and other ancient animals.

The site is famous for fossils of Gansus yumenesis, one of the first Mesozoic birds ever found in China. Since 2002, researchers have recovered more than 100 partial bird skeletons from Changma, including fossils with preserved soft tissue such as feathers, skin and claw sheaths.

"Our subsequent expeditions throughout the rest of the 2000s and into the 2010s established Changma as one of the world's most important fossil bird localities, Lamanna said. "It was an amazing thing to be a part of."

But until now, no one had found a non-avian dinosaur fossil from the basin.

That's what made J. changmaensis stand out. Amidst the fossil fragments, the specimen consisted of a fused shoulder blade, upper arm, radius and ulna. It was preserved in three dimensions, unlike many flattened microraptor fossils from the same area.

"Jian is one of the biggest microraptor specimens that has ever been found," Jingmai O’Connor, the associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum in Chicago and co-author of the study, said in the statement. "The piece of its upper arm bone that we have is about 4 inches [10 centimeters] long, so the entire dinosaur probably had something like a four-foot [1.2 meter] wingspan, around the size of a barn owl."

Microraptors were not birds. But they were very close relatives of the dinosaur lineage that gave rise to birds. Their bodies have elements that seem to blur the line between bird and dinosaur, including claws, sickle-shaped raptor feet and feathers.

"This is neat, a new fossil of those dinosaurs that were basically on the cusp of becoming true birds," Steve Brusatte, a professor of paleontology and evolution at Scotland’s University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the study, told CNN.

The bird hunter

The Changma Basin may have been a buffet for a tree-climbing predator like J. changmaensis. The site was dominated by early birds, as is evidenced by the many pellet-like remains, possibly the dinner remains of the newfound microraptor species.

Researchers can't prove that Jian made those pellets. But it is the only non-bird body fossil found at Changma so far. Jian was also a carnivore, and was much larger than the birds preserved there.

Other microraptor fossils support the idea that these dinosaurs ate from a wide menu. Previous fossilised specimens have been found with remains of fish, lizards, mammals and birds in their guts, suggesting microraptors were opportunistic hunters rather than picky specialists.

For J. changmaensis, birds may have been especially easy targets. If the dinosaur lived partly in trees and could glide, it may have ambushed early birds from branches or moved through the canopy like a sugar glider, according to the researchers.

"We don’t have very much of Jian, just some bones from the shoulder and forelimb," Lamanna said. "It's enough to know that there was this interesting new microraptor living 120 million years ago in what's now northwestern China, but not enough to be able to learn everything we'd like to learn about these dinosaurs. Maybe one of your readers will eventually become a paleontologist and be the one who finds the rest of Jian."

Daddy longlegs have been spotted devouring live frogs bigger than themselves in the tropical forests of South America, a new study reports. And this behavior might be more common than scientists expected.

"Finding these animals eating [live] frogs was a complete surprise, we didn't expect them to be able to capture them," study co-author Luís Fernando García, a biologist at the University of the Republic in Uruguay, told Live Science.

When arthropods, the group that includes animals like insects, spiders, centipedes and crustaceans, are observed eating vertebrates, it's typically treated as a rare or isolated phenomenon. But Jose Valdez, an ecologist at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in Germany who was not involved in the new study, has found that this type of predation — mostly on frogs, lizards, bats and birds — is actually quite common.

In reality, arthropod predation on vertebrates is under-documented, Valdez told Live Science in an email. Valdez's research has found it is most commonly spiders eating frogs, since frogs' soft bodies and thin skin make them relatively vulnerable.

Yet harvestmen (order Opiliones), also known as daddy longlegs, are not technically spiders; they are part of the arachnid class alongside spiders, but they are more closely related to scorpions, so observations like this new study are particularly noteworthy, Valdez said.

In the new paper, published April 21 in the journal Ecology and Evolution, the research team compiled 10 reports in South America of harvestmen eating frogs around their body size. The reports come from field observations in Ecuador and Colombia, scientific papers, and one from the citizen science platform iNaturalist, which lets anyone with a camera upload photos of wildlife and plants.

"The availability of good quality cameras on mobile phones has enormously helped in recording such interactions and making them available to specialists, sometimes through citizen science platforms," Olivier Pauwels, a conservation biologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences who was not involved in the new study, told Live Science in an email.

Previous anecdotal reports of daddy longlegs eating frogs have been unclear about whether the arachnid had killed the frog or scavenged an already dead amphibian.

"What we found is that they are able to capture frogs, because many frogs were still moving" in these observations, García said, suggesting that the arachnids might be actively hunting frogs.

The researchers don't know exactly how harvestmen capture frogs, since the arachnids are rather slow and don't have venom, García said. They may be hunting sleeping or resting frogs, or grabbing them with their strong front limbs, known as pedipalps, which are similar to the forelegs of praying mantises and can grasp prey.

"The most surprising aspect is how these harvestmen are able to subdue their prey" without venom to chemically immobilize animals, Valdez said. "Instead, they must rely entirely on physical restraint," an impressive feat since some frogs were up to 1.29 times the size of the arachnids eating them, the study found.

"We now have a new field to explore: the feeding and behavior of these animals, which is basically unknown," García said. "We think it is opportunistic behavior, they are generalist predators."

New discoveries about arthropods' diets in the tropics, and their interactions with other species, can help scientists understand how to conserve these ecosystems.

"The fate of some species is often linked to others," Pauwels said.

In this excerpt from "Cats: A History" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), author Rod Phillips, professor of history at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, examines a bizarre practice that began in the Middle Ages — putting animals on trials for "crimes" they had committed. Animals, including birds, insects and livestock, were taken to court and punished as humans would be. But there was a surprising outlier: law-abiding cats.

It might seem odd, even irrational, to blame cats for being cats. We might accept that it is simply the nature of cats and that while some individual cats tend to be more or less friendly toward humans, others remain consistently aloof.

But in the early modern period animals (and birds and insects) were attributed responsibility for their behavior as if they had the same agency and intentionality, and bore the same moral accountability, as humans. To this extent they could be punished for behavior that was deemed criminal or immoral.

A striking example is the trials of animals that were held throughout much of Europe from the Late Middle Ages to the end of the 18th century. (There were scattered cases in Europe after that time, and others in places as diverse as Russia, Brazil, the United States, and Canada.) In the early modern period animal trials seem to have been most common in France, but they also took place in Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, and occasionally in Britain, Spain, and Italy.

These trials ­were no dif­ferent from regular ­trials except that the defendant was not a human but an animal or, in some cases, several animals or a herd, flock, pack, or swarm of creatures. The indictments in animal trials were based on the law codes in force at the time and involved a range of crimes. Large mammals, such as cows and horses, sometimes killed humans and were charged with murder. Animals, notably sheep, that were subject to bestiality were said to have consented and were executed along with the human perpetrator.

The most common defendants in animal trials were pigs, which were widely kept in and around households in Europe at the time, and which sometimes killed and ate babies and small children. Animal trials were presided over by regular judges and the cases were argued by lawyers. The punishments, if the animals were found guilty, were the same as those imposed on humans: animals were imprisoned in jails where humans were incarcerated or executed by the same professional executioners who dispatched convicted humans. When they were fined, their ­owners ­were required to pay.

A dif­ferent sort of case involved suits in church courts against insects, rodents, and other vermin that had damaged crops. The defendants in these cases included locusts, leeches, rats, and mice, and when they were found guilty, they were generally excommunicated and sometimes ordered to go to places where they could do no harm.

There is a big difference between the place of animals in these cases and modern cases that involve animals that have caused harm. Dogs are sometimes ordered killed ("destroyed" is the usual term) by courts when they inflict serious injuries on ­people, but they are not found guilty of the offense in a formal sense, even though they perpetrated it. They are usually killed not to punish them but to prevent a recurrence and to protect other people. In many of these cases, the owner of the dog is punished in some way in addition to being deprived of their dog.

In the animal trials, in contrast, the animals themselves were found criminally responsible, and the owners were not punished, even if some were deprived of valuable animals or had to pay fines on their behalf. In an apparent exception in Chartres, France, in 1499, the parents of a child killed by their pig ­were ordered to pay a fine, but they ­were ordered to do so not because of their pig's actions but because they had failed to watch over their child more carefully.

There is some debate whether Europeans believed that non-human creatures had a sense of intentionality that made them as responsible as humans for their actions. Animal trials might instead show, suggests Emre Koyuncu, that the principles of being subject to the law "were not strictly grounded on rationality and intelligence." There is no explicit evidence that anyone participating in these cases believed that animals were rational in the same sense as humans, and some legal authorities clearly stated that they were not.

Yet the way these proceedings unfolded strongly implied culpability on the part of creatures found guilty. The unresolved issue is the extent to which a finding of guilt implied rationality and intentionality.

There is another phenomenon suggesting that non-human animals were believed capable of rational calculation of a human kind. It was a common practice, for many centuries, to hang dead or mutilated specimens of unwelcome animals so as to convince their fellow creatures to stay away. Sometimes referred to as a "gamekeeper's gibbet," the custom sometimes took the form of hanging rabbits or weasels from tree branches as a warning to others. It is analogous to the practices, also common in early modern Europe, of executing people in public and sticking the decapitated heads of executed criminals on spikes as a warning to passersby.

Whether they worked as deterrents we cannot know, but at least it had a chance with beings (people) who could draw a lesson from the sight of a severed head. If people thought that animals could draw the same lessons, it tells us about their understanding of the intellect and moral codes of animals.

Although a wide range of animals, birds, and insects were involved in animal trials, there are hardly any records of cats being charged with any crime. Even dogs, considered the most faithful of creatures, quite often found themselves on trial, usually for biting people — although there is one medieval account of a faithful dog that brought its master's murderer to court, where he was convicted and executed.

One compilation of animal trials from the ninth to 19th centuries lists almost 200 but not one cat is included among the defendants — which include dogs, wolves, grasshoppers, snails, goats, pigs, and ­horses. Even so, a satirical print (about 1690) by the Dutch artist Egbert van Heemskerck shows a female cat being tried by a monkey magistrate in the presence of various animal witnesses.

Cats participated in some animal trials, but not as defendants. In the early 16th century the rats of the diocese of Autun, in Burgundy, were summoned to appear before a court for having eaten the barley crop, but they failed to appear at the specified time. Their ­lawyer won the rats an extension by arguing that cats were watching for them, making their journey to the court perilous, and that no one should be expected to appear at the court unless they could do so safely. There is no record whether the rats later turned up to face the charge.

The reason no cats seem to have been arraigned in animal trials might simply have been that cats did not commit crimes that were serious enough. Unlike pigs they did not eat children, unlike dogs they did not bite people (at least, not seriously), unlike cattle they did not gore people to death, unlike locusts they did not ravage crops, and unlike a range of other creatures they were not involved in bestiality.

For all that might have been said against cats, they were remarkably law-abiding animals, even if because they did not have the physical ability, size, or dietary preferences to commit the offenses that landed other creatures in court. That did not prevent people from torturing and killing cats, but those were extrajudicial actions that were far removed from animal trials. When cats ­were identified as witches' familiars, however, it was another matter entirely.

The first-ever whole-genome sequence of a Greenland shark has revealed genetic clues to how the animals avoid cancer and live for hundreds of years. The work may pave the way to a better understanding of age-related diseases in humans.

Greenland sharks (Somniosus microcephalus) typically grow to about 13 to 16 feet (4 to 5 meters) and live long lives in the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans. Little is known about these sharks, partly because they live at depths of up to 1.65 miles (2.65 kilometers). They are estimated to live to about 400 years and don't reach maturity until they're about 150 years old, making them the longest-living vertebrates in the world.

Now, new research by Shigeharu Kinoshita, a fisheries chemist at the University of Tokyo, and his colleagues has uncovered nearly the entire sequence ‪—‬ 96.7% ‪—‬ of a Greenland shark genome. In their study, published May 19 in the journal PNAS, the researchers found a wealth of genes that could be linked to the sharks' longevity.

Key among the findings were genetic tweaks relating to unique amino acid substitutions in "linker histone proteins," a series of proteins that spool and compact DNA. These changes may stabilize the structure of the sharks' chromatin, the mixture of DNA and proteins that makes up the chromosomes. This, in turn, may help to suppress the accumulation of DNA damage over the sharks' exceptionally long lifespans, Kinoshita told Live Science by email.

The researchers also found that gene families related to immune responses and DNA repair pathways were expanded in the shark genome. This finding, Kinoshita said, supports the idea that efficient damage repair and regulation of the immune system are key components of both longevity and cancer resistance.

A third discovery that provides clues to the sharks' longevity was the marked expansion of ferritin genes, which are involved in iron storage and regulation. This gene expansion suggests the sharks have a boosted capacity to control iron metabolism and to limit oxidative stress, which can damage DNA and lead to cancer. It may also mean they restrict a mechanism called ferroptosis, an iron-dependent form of programmed cell death.

"Our genomic analyses revealed multiple lines of evidence pointing to enhanced genome stability and stress resistance in the Greenland shark," Kinoshita said. "Extreme longevity is likely governed not by a single gene, but by coordinated changes across multiple biological systems, including genome stability, iron metabolism, immune function, and stress resistance," he said, adding that the work could inform research on human aging and age-related diseases.

The features linked to immune enhancement, cancer resistance, DNA repair and chromatin stability may help to explain the shark's extreme lifespan, said Dorota Skowronska-Krawczyk, a physiologist and biophysicist at the University of California, Irvine, who recently showed how DNA-repair-associated genes in the retina may help keep the Greenland shark's eyesight clear over its long life. "This could be related to longevity and cancer resistance, but functional studies will be needed to test that idea directly," said Skowronska-Krawczyk, who was not involved in the research.

Previous work suggested that the sharks' metabolism remains stable throughout their lives, which has been given as another reason for their epic longevity.

Aaron MacNeil, a biologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who was not involved in the research, told Live Science that the results support the idea that the sharks are particularly long-lived. But MacNeil is skeptical of the 400-year age estimate, which is based on radiocarbon isotope traces left over from Cold War nuclear bomb testing seen in the eyes of sharks. The eye lenses grow in layers, so seeing where the isotope sits in the layers gives a fixed point in time that helps assess the animals' age.

The slow mixing of different layers of the ocean in the cold depths where Greenland sharks live means it could take longer for the bomb radiocarbon to reach the deep sea, and thus the age estimate for the sharks may be too high. "But we do know they're damn old — 200 years at least," MacNeil said.

How much of a shark fan are you? Find out with our shark quiz!

There's an army of tiny workers buzzing around our fields, helping our food grow. But over the past few decades, populations of bees and other insect pollinators have dropped precipitously. This looming "insect apocalypse" has many causes, from climate change to habitat loss, and it is already fueling malnutrition in some parts of the world.

One of the biggest factors in bee declines is industrial agriculture. "Big Ag" — with its emphasis on vast fields planted with a single crop, its heavy reliance on powerful pesticides, and its intensive use of commercial bee colonies to pollinate crops like almonds — reduces pollinator populations by killing and disorienting the insects, reducing their natural food sources, and leaving colony bees overworked and, therefore, prone to parasites like Varroa.

But industrial agriculture isn't the only force driving down bee populations. In her new book, "Bitter Honey: Big Ag's Threat to Bees and the Fight to Save Them" (Princeton University Press, 2026), writer and environmental researcher Jennie Durant takes a look at one surprising factor that may be hurting bees — and how new laws could protect these pollinators.

It's midsummer in Columbia, Maryland, and Janet Crouch's garden is in full bloom. It began in spring, when deep purple violets and bright yellow ragwort blossomed in April and early May. By midsummer, pink and purple-hued garden phlox emerged alongside scarlet bee balm, eventually giving way to Turk's cap lilies with their curled-back orange petals that dangle gracefully like bells. Pollinators creep and flutter throughout the garden, including bees and hummingbirds, moths and butterflies — and a host of other birds and insects.

It wasn't always like this. The yard was barren back in 1999, when Janet and her husband, Jeff, first bought their home. A solitary maple stood in the front yard, and a few nonnative barberry bushes flanked the house. Each property had a private lawn, but without fences, the yards blended into a seamless green expanse that bordered a fifty-acre county park forest. Over the years, the couple transformed their lawn into a lush pollinator garden.

Over time, the Crouches' yard became a sanctuary, especially for Jeff, a practicing therapist. "He'd come home from work, drop his keys, and head outside to see who was around," Janet said. "He'd check to see what new flower had bloomed, what butterfly or moth was in the yard, or spot a bird we hadn't seen before. It's become a huge, huge part of our lives." Sometimes, kids would even walk by and take an interest in the garden, and Jeff would pick them a flower.

But everything changed in 2017. The Crouches received a letter from their homeowners association (HOA), which they paid into biannually, that threatened to undo all the work they had poured into their garden. HOAs govern housing communities, from condominium complexes to suburban neighborhoods, and set rules for property maintenance and aesthetic standards.

An elected board of homeowners typically runs the HOA and collects fees to cover shared expenses like landscaping, common areas, and building maintenance. The first letter seemed harmless. It simply asked them to practice seasonal maintenance: mow the grass, trim overgrown plants, and tidy up. The Crouches worked with Janet's sister Nancy — a native plant gardener and advocate — to craft a response, explaining that the lawn was already mowed, and they were gardening ecologically, which meant things might look more natural than the typical lawn-centric yard.

Weeks passed without a reply. Then, just before Thanksgiving, the Crouches received a cease-and-desist notice from the HOA's attorney. They were given ten days to tear out their garden and replace it with turf grass or face legal action. By this point, the Crouches had tended their garden for seventeen years, so the thought of tearing it all out was gut-wrenching.

Instead, they hired an attorney, who argued that they hadn't broken any HOA rules because the community guidelines didn't address the type of garden they'd installed. Despite their tight deadline to get an attorney and craft a response, the Crouches heard nothing from the HOA for six months, leaving them in anxious limbo. When the HOA finally responded, it ignited a legal battle that drew the attention of state legislators and eventually changed Maryland law.

The Crouches were stunned by the HOA's reply: The board didn't just want them to do maintenance, they wanted them to pull out everything, including their pollinator gardens in the front and back. The Crouches were baffled — they'd never had any complaints about their garden until now.

Established in the 1970s, HOAs have a significant footprint in the United States: They govern millions of residential acres and house more than seventy-five million Americans, representing nearly 30 percent of the country's housing stock. HOAs offer a range of benefits for house and condo owners: They enforce rules and community standards; maintain shared amenities like parks, gyms, pools, and clubhouses; and foster a sense of community. Homes in HOA-governed communities often sell at a premium as well.

But the appeal of an HOA home is far from universal. The perks come with restrictions that often stifle a homeowner's freedom to manage their property as they wish. HOA boards can turn authoritarian, sparking conflicts with residents or fueling tensions between neighbors. Sky-high fees can trap homeowners, making it difficult to sell the house or keep up with payments, sometimes leading to legal trouble. It's no surprise that homeowners have mixed feelings about HOAs: A 2024 survey reported that nearly 60 percent of members had a negative view of their HOA.

While overtly abusive HOAs have made the news, their role in stifling pollinator gardens is less understood. It comes down to aesthetics: Many HOAs mandate manicured lawns and turf grass and dismiss pollinator gardens or wildflower meadows as messy, unruly, or unattractive. They tend to favor nonnative ornamental plants over native species to maintain a uniform, tidy look. The ornamentals are often chosen to match a landscaping style, signal status (nothing says wealth like a perfect row of hydrangeas), or simply because they're easier for the HOA's landscaping company to maintain.

But that manicured perfection comes at a cost. For pollinators, the mowed lawn is a food desert. Regular mowing prevents weeds like dandelions and clover from flowering and providing food. Lawns also replace diverse landscapes filled with wildflowers, shrubs, and native plants — the forage that pollinators evolved with over thousands of years and rely on for survival.

Lawns don't just deprive pollinators of food; they also eliminate their homes. More than 70 percent of native bee species nest in the ground, but manicured turf prevents bees from finding the loose, sandy soil they need to burrow. Mowing and trimming tall grass also strips away shelter for insects like butterflies and beetles. In pursuit of neatness, homeowners typically remove brush piles, leaf litter, tall grasses, or fallen logs — spaces pollinators might use as nests. Neighborhoods dominated by lawns fragment forage corridors and force pollinators to travel greater distances to find food, making survival even harder.

The pursuit of a pristine lawn also involves an arsenal of chemicals. Many of the same bee-toxic substances used in industrial agriculture — like neonics, organophosphates, and carbamates — are also sprayed on home lawns, gardens, and HOA common spaces. These chemicals affect plants, seep into the soil, and disrupt ecosystems. Healthy soil supports wild plants, insects, and fungi that benefit pollinators, but chemical lawn treatments can kill those beneficial insects and degrade soil health.

The Crouches received not only a cease-and-desist notice from their HOA but also threatening letters warning them not to garden in ways that might attract birds, as if birds were some kind of nuisance.

They soon discovered the HOA's attacks were driven by a complaint from their next-door neighbor. Instead of complaining to the Crouches directly so they could find a solution, he'd gone straight to the HOA. In September 2018, the Crouches and their neighbor had a contentious hearing before the HOA board, where the HOA's attorney argued that landscaping should only be for decoration, not wildlife habitat.

Many more months went by without a resolution, and then in 2019, the legal fight began in earnest. The Crouches sued the HOA board in August, citing a lack of actual violations, and the HOA countersued in November.

For many, this kind of fight might have soured the gardening experience altogether. But for Janet and Jeff, it only reinforced what they already knew: Their garden was about more than just aesthetics. It was a space of purpose, resilience, and joy. This helped fuel them throughout their ordeal.

The months that followed were rife with anxiety. As the lawsuit progressed into 2020, people drove by and took photographs of their lawn and garden, which made Janet feel exposed and overwhelmed. But still, it didn't deter them. "I don't like bullies, and we were being bullied in our own home," Janet said. "I just kept thinking about all the people who didn't have the capacity or resources I did, like my sister, who could provide suggestions and be an ear. I was more determined than ever to keep going."

Janet cast a wide net for support, turning to social media, local newspapers — anyone who could offer ideas or help spread the word. She attended environmental events to share her story and discuss the legal battle with her HOA.

Then, in October 2019, things started to turn in their favor. They got a call from Mary Catherine Cochran, the legislative assistant to their state representative, Terri Hill. Mary Catherine had an idea: Would Janet be interested in helping craft a law to stop HOAs from requiring turf grass lawns? By January of 2020, just months before the pandemic shut everything down, Nancy and several environmental groups joined Janet in Annapolis to provide testimony. The pandemic delayed their progress, but the bill eventually moved through both houses with overwhelming support — only two people voted against it.

On October 1, 2021, Maryland House Bill 332 was passed into law. Thanks to the bill, Maryland HOAs can no longer prohibit low impact landscaping, including pollinator gardens, rain gardens, and other environmentally beneficial practices. It was a massive victory for native plant and pollinator advocates throughout the state, and homeowners who hope to follow in the Crouches' footsteps.

The Maryland law set a precedent for other states as well: Maine passed a similar law in 2023 to create habitat for wildlife and pollinators by protecting low-impact landscaping. Illinois enacted the Garden Act in 2022 to support local gardens, followed by a Homeowners Native Landscaping Act in 2024 to allow gardeners in HOAs to plant native gardens.

The Maryland law's passage didn't happen in time to help the Crouches, who chose to settle with the HOA in December of 2020 rather than take the case to trial. Fortunately, the only concession they had to make — in addition to a jaw-dropping $60,000 in attorney's fees — was to keep their garden within a six-foot setback from the front property line and three feet from the neighbor's, the latter of which they'd already done.

Now that Janet and Jeff's battle is over, they can enjoy their yard and extend their efforts beyond their neighborhood. But their story highlights a simple truth: Individual actions can sometimes drive systemic change.

As the Crouches have shown, anyone, whether they have a sprawling yard, a small patch of land, or just a balcony, can take steps to support pollinators. A single garden might feel insignificant but small changes can rewrite laws, shift local norms, and transform ecosystems. If we rethink what a garden can be, we open the door to new possibilities — not just for pollinators, but for our landscapes and our connection to the natural world.

Around 66 million years ago, a gigantic asteroid smashed into Earth and wreaked chaos globally.

Superheated rock from the impact spewed into the air, creating a mushroom cloud that heated Earth's upper atmosphere to a scorching 439 degrees Fahrenheit (226 degrees Celsius). Mile-high tsunami waves rushed through the Gulf of Mexico and disturbed ocean basins half a world away. Fires raged, burning animals and plants to a crisp. Shock waves propagated, blasting everything in their path. And particles from the collision, including sulfur, shot upward, blocking the sun and falling down as acid rain.

In all, 75% of Earth's species went extinct, including the nonavian dinosaurs. So how did some animals ‪—‬ including species of birds, turtles and mammals ‪—‬ survive the catastrophic asteroid collision and its aftermath?

Size, it turns out, played a crucial role. Earth's largest apex predators and herbivores — dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops, and marine reptiles like plesiosaurs and the behemoth Mosasaurus — were doomed from the moment of impact, Kenneth Lacovara, founding executive director of the Edelman Fossil Park and Museum of Rowan University in New Jersey, told Live Science. That's because their enormity meant they were more likely to be harmed during the initial blast, were unable to hide in a safe place during the apocalyptic aftermath, and needed massive amounts of sustenance to survive in a time when food was scarce.

It's not too surprising that size would be linked to survival, Lacovara said. On land, "it's pretty clear in terms of correlation that you have to be small, and you have to be a burrower to get through this event," said Lacovara, who is also a professor of paleontology and geology at Rowan University. Small animals, such as some lizards and mammals, which were no larger than badgers at that time, were more likely to find shelter from the asteroid's immediate and long-term aftereffects. Other small animals that required less food, such as some turtles and fish, were sheltered in the water.

The avian group that led to modern birds survived likely because they were small and had powerful wings and chest muscles that allowed them to fly well and escape dire situations or find new opportunities. Their chicks also grew quickly, meaning they could soon fend for themselves and not overtax their parents.

This led to an overall shift in the average size of Earth's animals. On land, most of the largest surviving animals were about the size of house cats; in the water, the largest survivors were about the size of a "run-of-the-mill shark," Lacovara said.

What the survivors ate

Diet was likely another important factor, said Roger Benson, a curator of dinosaur paleobiology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The plant eaters and those that ate them were especially hard-hit, as the sun was obstructed for up to a decade. Even with size on their side, some smaller creatures, such as certain lizard and turtle species, went extinct because their diets were too reliant on photosynthesizing plants, Benson said.

Aquatic ecosystems were a bit more shielded from the asteroid's initial impact, especially in deeper oceans and freshwater ecosystems. But as photosynthesizing plankton died off due to a lack of sunlight, food systems collapsed and large marine animals starved. Those that consumed dead, organic detritus had a better chance of survival. Some of those resilient marine creatures included the sea sponges, sharks of the Carcharias genus, and mollusks, including the lineage that led to today's chambered nautilus (Nautilus pompilius).

Seed eaters, including birds, and foraging insectivores, such as the tree-dwelling primate Purgatorius janisae, had a better shot at surviving because their food sources of seeds and insects weren't destroyed by extreme temperature changes and a lack of sunlight.

A common theory is that species with more generalist diets had a better chance of surviving the drastic environmental change. For example, Purgatorius coracis, a small mammal, survived the mass extinction thanks to their wide-ranging diet of insects, fruits and seeds. (This trend holds true for modern animals facing climate change: Those with generalist diets, such as crows and raccoons, are expected to do well because they have a wide range of foods to fall back on in case one food source disappears.)

Some species got lucky if their prey were also survivors. A few aquatic turtle species, like Hutchemys rememdium, had an adaptive feeding habit of eating shelled creatures which were living off detritus in aquatic ecosystems. A 2026 study found this adaptation, called durophagy, was linked to comparatively high survival rates during this mass extinction.

Certain behaviors, such as a higher capacity for reproduction or behavioral flexibility in a changing environment, may have enabled survival Benson said.

Mysterious exceptions

Despite current evidence, there are still unknowns surrounding mass extinction survivorship. Recent research indicates we don't know why certain adaptations helped some species but not others.

For example, many present-day species of bivalves feed on microscopic aquatic organisms that rely on the sun to survive. However, among the aquatic bivalves that survived the asteroid and its impacts, reliance on the sun didn't strongly determine survivorship. In another case, night lizards that survived near the impact site are known to have small litters, which goes against the hypothesis that fecundity is advantageous following extinctions. However, these night lizards' slow metabolisms were likely helpful for their survival, and they persist today, the study noted.

And the discovery that a large, terrestrial croc (Tewkensuchus salamanquensis) survived the asteroid strike in what is now Argentina raises questions about how this 660-pound (300 kilogram) species survived. This also raises questions whether the asteroid's impacts weren't as strong in the Southern Hemisphere as they were in the Northern Hemisphere. For example, the wide diversity of plant fossils uncovered in present-day Argentina suggests plants were able to regrow faster at southernmost latitudes.

"We also don't know why mammals emerged from the extinction as the dominant macrofauna," Lacovara said. One theory is that mammals are more resistant to fungal infections than reptiles are, giving mammals a better shot at surviving the "mini age of fungus" that followed the mass extinction.

After all, how evolution proceeded following the mass extinction is a part of humanity's history. The animals that survived ultimately ushered in the age of mammals, including humans, that continues to this day.

What do you know about crocs? Test your knowledge with our crocodile quiz!

Sable Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia, is home to the world's largest gray seal breeding colony — and the site of a gruesome, decades-old mystery that's finally been solved.

Reports of traumatically injured seals have plagued Sable Island since at least 1980. Gray seal (Halichoerus grypus) pups were found with strange spiral-shaped lacerations that tore to the bone, starting at the seals' mouths and winding down to their chests. The oddly shaped injuries led scientists to guess the culprit might be sharks or ship propellers. However, there was no direct evidence to confirm either of those theories.

Now, new research reveals the real corkscrew killers: cannibalistic male gray seals.

Species across the animal kingdom engage in cannibalistic behavior. Cannibalism was first documented in gray seals in Nova Scotia in 1992, and since then, there have been other cases of gray seals preying on pups of their own species.

In 2016, gray seal cannibalism was recorded in Scotland, with direct observations confirming this was the cause of corkscrew-shaped lacerations. Yet gray seal cannibalism still hadn't been observed directly on Sable Island.

"Cannibalism so far has been frequently observed in grey seals," Ursula Siebert, a wildlife researcher at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover in Germany who was not involved with the new research, told Live Science in an email. "There was a high potential that this behavior would also be detected [on Sable Island] after we understood the phenomenon."

In 2024, the authors of the new study finally witnessed an adult male gray seal attacking a pup on Sable Island. They began to closely examine seal pups with the spiral-shaped injuries throughout the island, and found bite and claw marks on the animals' skin and blubber that looked like the work of gray seals.

The new paper, published Feb. 4 in the journal Marine Mammal Science, reports these firsthand accounts of gray seal cannibalism on Sable Island. Reanalyzing drone footage from 2023 as well, the research team recorded instances of adult male gray seals feeding on gray seal pups from 2023 through 2025.

Overall, the researchers found 765 seal pups with corkscrew markings during the 2024 breeding season. On a single day in 2025, they found 359 pups that had died from these injuries. However, this may not necessarily indicate that there was a spike in attacks but rather that scientists improved their searches for these pups.

"We were certainly relieved to have an answer to the cause of these deaths," Damian Lidgard, a biologist at Fisheries and Oceans Canada and co-author of the new study, told Live Science in an email. For years, the cause was assumed to be shark predation, Lidgard added, but without any observations of sharks causing these deaths at Sable Island. With instances of male gray seal cannibalism elsewhere, the researchers were not surprised to discover the cause, he said.

The researchers don't necessarily think the behavior is a cause for alarm. "The most recent estimate of grey seal pup production on Sable Island is about 75,000," Lidgard said. "Given that the number of pup deaths from male grey seals is estimated at under 1,000, there is no significant impact of cannibalism on the seal population on Sable Island."

However, understanding the cause of seal pup deaths is important for the management and conservation of the island.

Although cannibalistic behavior has only been recorded in male gray seals on Sable Island, Lidgard said, it is possible that male gray seals are also targeting harbor seal (Phoca vitulina) pups that live on Sable Island, since this has been observed in Europe.

"Grey seals not only practice cannibalism, but also kill other marine mammals such as harbour seals," Siebert said, "[so] it can become a threat to those populations."

"Harbour seal pup production on Sable Island is very small," with populations in decline in recent decades, Lidgard noted, so this is potentially concerning.

The researchers added that the cause behind the cannibalism remains unknown.

"We are not sure why this is occurring on Sable or in other locations," Lidgard said. "This may be a natural behaviour of grey seal males (as observed in other species) that has only recently been observed and documented. It might be a learned behaviour from an individual but that is unlikely given that it occurs on Sable and in the UK which are genetically/behaviourally isolated. I could keep providing hypotheses but really we don't understand the cause."

There's a new T. rex in town, but this one didn't hunt on land. It ruled the ancient seas.

Scientists have described a new species of mosasaur, a member of a marine reptile group that lived at the same time as dinosaurs during the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago). The newly named species fits into an already known genus: Tylosaurus. But its new species name, Tylosaurus rex — T. rex, for short — sets it apart from the other mosasaur species in the group.

The species name means "king of the tylosaurs," according to a new study published Thursday (May 21) in the journal Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. The fossils are about 80 million years old and were discovered mostly in northern Texas decades ago.

The mosasaur T. rex measured up to 43 feet (13 meters) long, or about the length of a tour bus. It had finely serrated teeth, unusually powerful jaws, and evidence on its fossils of violent combat with its own species.

"Everything is bigger in Texas and that includes the mosasaurs, apparently," study first author Amelia Zietlow, a research associate of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, said in a statement.

A misidentified species

While examining a fossil in the American Museum of Natural History's collection, Zietlow noticed that a specimen labeled as Tylosaurus proriger — a well-known mosasaur species first described in 1869 — didn't quite match others of its kind. The unusual fossil was discovered in 1979 near an artificial reservoir outside Dallas.

After comparing the specimen with the original name-bearing fossil of T. proriger held at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, Zietlow and her colleagues found that it belonged to a newfound species. This specimen wasn't the only misidentified specimen of this species; more than a dozen fossils at other institutions shared the same traits.

Compared with T. proriger, the newly described T. rex was 13 feet (4 m) longer, had finely serrated teeth (which T. proriger lacked) and lived several million years later. Most T. proriger fossils were discovered in what is now Kansas and are roughly 84 million years old, while the fossils now identified as T. rex are mostly from Texas and date to about 80 million years ago. At that time, the Western Interior Seaway stretched from the Gulf of Mexico up to the Arctic and was home to many sea creatures, including mosasaurs.

A violent tyrannical king

The new T. rex's anatomy suggests that, like its mosasaur relatives, it was a formidable marine predator. In addition to its massive size, T. rex had strong jaw and neck muscles.

Some fossils show signs of brutal injuries. One specimen in the collection of the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, nicknamed "the Black Knight," is missing the tip of its snout and has a fractured lower jaw. The researchers suspect the damage was caused by another individual of the same species.

"Through our study and examination of well-preserved fossils collected throughout the north Texas region, we have evidence of violence within this species to a degree not previously seen in other Tylosaurus specimens," study co-author Ron Tykoski, vice president of science and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, said in the statement.

A name to remember

Other famous mosasaur specimens once identified as T. proriger will now be reassigned to to T. rex, including "Bunker," a large specimen on display at the University of Kansas that was discovered in 1911, and "Sophie," a specimen displayed at the Yale Peabody Museum.

The name also nods to an earlier idea. In the late 1960s, paleontologist John Thurmond recognized that large tylosaurs from northeast Texas might represent an unknown species. He informally called them Tylosaurus thalassotyrannus, meaning "sea tyrant."

This is not the first time "T. rex" has had a naming twist. The land-dwelling Tyrannosaurus rex almost ended up with the name Manospondylus gigas, after paleontologist Edward Cope described two partial backbones from South Dakota in 1892. Those bones were later linked to T. rex, but they were too incomplete to clearly define the species when they were first described. By the time the bones were connected to T. rex, its name was already deeply embedded in scientific literature and popular culture.

While the aquatic T. rex seems to have resolved the misidentification issue, the new study also revisited another long-standing problem in mosasaur research: The dataset used to study mosasaur evolutionary relationships has changed little in nearly 30 years. By reanalyzing the evolutionary data on the species, the team also proposed a new evolutionary family tree among tylosaurs and argued mosasaur evolution needs a broader reassessment.

"This discovery is not just about naming a new species," Zietlow said. "It highlights the need to revisit long-standing assumptions about mosasaur evolution and to modernize the tools we use to study these iconic marine reptiles."

T. rex quiz: How much do you really know about the king of the dinosaurs?

A trove of fossils uncovered in northwestern Canada suggests that complex animals evolved in North America earlier than previously thought.

The site houses more than 100 fossils, including six taxa never found in North America before, with some dating back 567 million years. The findings push back the origins of animals that can move themselves in search of food by several million years, according to a study published May 20 in the journal Science Advances.

"For 3 billion years, life on Earth was dominated by microbes," study co-author Scott D. Evans, assistant curator of invertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, said in a statement. Then, all of a sudden, "we get these strange-looking marine animals big enough to see and capable of behaviors we would find familiar today. If we want to understand this transition, when life first became large, complex and unmistakenly animal, this new site has tremendous potential."

Complex, multicellular animals first evolved during the Ediacaran period (635 million to 541 million years ago). At this time, North America was part of the ancient continent Laurentia, which predated the supercontinent Pangaea.

Some of these early animals from the Ediacaran are linked to modern animals, like mollusks and jellyfish, while others look nothing like any species living today. Most, however, had soft bodies without shells or bones, so fossils from this period are rare.

Scientists split the fossils that did form into three groups, or assemblages, based on when the animals lived. The Avalon assemblage (575 million to 559 million years ago) consisted of stationary animals that lived deep underwater. The White Sea assemblage (559 million to 550 million years ago) contained a more diverse group of animals that lived in shallower water, and the Nama assemblage (550 million to 538 million years ago) included the earliest animals that formed shells and bones.

In the new study, the researchers discovered several fossils of species known to belong to the White Sea assemblage for the first time in North America. These fossils date back 5 million to 10 million years earlier than White Sea assemblage fossils previously found in Europe, Asia and Australia.

Among the fossils were Dickinsonia, a flat, oval-shaped organism that absorbed algae through its entire bottom surface; Funisia, a tube-shaped creature that represents the oldest evidence of sexual reproduction among animals; and Kimberella, an early mollusk that may now be the oldest fossil species to exhibit bilateral symmetry.

"Not only is this new site highly diverse, but also it is from a part of the rock succession where we have previously lacked fossil remains," study co-author Justin Strauss, an Earth scientist at Dartmouth College, said in the statement. "This is really exciting. Given our understanding of the regional geology in northwestern Canada, there is great potential here to revisit our understanding of Ediacaran Earth history."

That potential may apply to the creatures' evolutionary history. Based on the sediment patterns in the surrounding rock, the fossilized organisms found in Canada lived in deeper water than researchers previously thought creatures in the White Sea assemblage lived. That could suggest that the animals first evolved in deep water and gradually expanded their range into shallower water — the opposite of typical animal evolution.

"We think of the deep ocean as a dark, inhospitable place, but it is also relatively stable, with few fluctuations in things like temperature and oxygen essential to most animal life," Evans said in the statement. "This stability may have provided key opportunities to support early animal life."

Scientists have described a new species of highly venomous box jellyfish based on specimens that were lurking near a Singaporean island formerly known as Pulau Blakang Mati, or the "Island of Death Behind," in 2020 and 2021.

The newly described species, Chironex blakangmati, was named after the island's original, ominous name in Malay, rather than its name since 1972, Sentosa, which means "peace and tranquility." That's fitting, given how dangerous the animal is.

C. blakangmati is one of four known species of Chironex box jellyfish, all of which are incredibly venomous. Their stings, delivered via special cells on their tentacles called nematocysts, are so powerful they can kill humans. And unlike most other jellyfish that simply ride on currents, Chironex box jellies can actively identify and swim toward prey thanks to their strong musculature and complex eyes.

Previously, scientists had mistaken C. blakangmati for another box jellyfish species, C. yamaguchii. However, it turns out that these box jellies are different, both genetically and morphologically, scientists reported in a new study, published May 15 in the journal Raffles Bulletin of Zoology.

"C. blakangmati looks remarkably like Chironex yamaguchii — a jellyfish species I first discovered in Okinawa while doing my master's degree there," study co-author Cheryl Ames, a professor of applied marine biology at Tohoku University in Japan and a research associate at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., said in a statement. "But we realized they were completely distinct. I actually went back to dust off an old sample of C. yamaguchii I still had in storage in Okinawa to help with the comparisons!"

The researchers found that the newly identified species lacks branched canal structures at the bottom of its bell-shaped body that C. yamaguchii and the other two Chironex species, C. fleckeri and C. indrasaksajiae, exhibit. Specifically, these canals sit within the perradial lappets, which are flaps reinforcing the musculature that propels box jellyfish when they swim. Together with genetic discrepancies, this anatomical difference confirmed that C. blakangmati is a separate species, according to the statement.

"Our thorough review and analysis of all the Chironex species known to date reveal a lot about these box jellyfishes," study co-author Danwei Huang, an associate professor in the National University of Singapore's Department of Biological Sciences and the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum, said in the statement.

The results also revealed for the first time that C. indrasaksajiae, which is typically found off the coast of Thailand, is present in Singapore's waters. Nicknamed the Thai sea wasp, this species can be deadly.

"We were surprised to find C. indrasaksajiae so far away from Thailand," Ames said. "Recording range expansions like these is really important, as we currently know so little about the biodiversity and spatial distribution of box jellyfish."

A better understanding of the distribution of box jellies could help prevent severe injuries and deaths in humans, according to the statement.

Records suggest box jellyfish stings cause around 40 deaths per year globally, but some experts think that number is a huge underestimate.

Gigantic fossils discovered in Thailand reveal the "last titan," a long-necked dinosaur that lived up to 120 million years ago when the region was semi-arid, a new study finds.

Dubbed Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis, the newfound species is the largest sauropod, or long-necked dinosaur, found in Southeast Asia to date. It likely measured about 90 feet (27 meters) in length and weighed around 30 tons (27 metric tons), according to a study published Thursday (May 14) in the journal Scientific Reports.

"Our dinosaur is big by most people's standards — it likely weighed at least 10 tonnes [11 tons] more than Dippy the Diplodocus (Diplodocus carnegii)," study first author Thitiwoot Sethapanichsakul, a paleontologist at University College London, said in a statement. However, it is not the largest known sauropod, weighing less than half as much as its South American relatives Patagotitan and Argentinosaurus.

The research team uncovered the fossils from the Khok Kruat Formation in the Chaiyaphum province of northeastern Thailand. A local resident first spotted the fossils in 2016 in a bone bed on the side of a drying pond.

Among the recovered fossils are several vertebrae, pelvic bones and leg bones, including the dinosaur's right femur, or thigh bone. Though the femur had broken into several pieces, the scientists estimated it would have been about 6.5 feet (2 meters) in length — about as high as a tall human.

N. chaiyaphumensis was a type of dinosaur known as a somphospondylan sauropod, a subgroup of large, long-necked dinosaurs that lived from the late Jurassic through the Cretaceous. Fossils from this group have been found on every continent. The shapes of N. chaiyaphumensis's vertebrae and leg bones set it apart from other previously known sauropods.

The team named the sauropod's genus Nagatitan after Naga, "the mythological serpent-like creature found in various Asian cultures, especially in northeastern Thailand, often associated with water and Buddhism," they wrote in the study. "Titan," meanwhile, is from the giants in Greek mythology. The species name chaiyaphumensis is named for the Chaiyaphum province.

During the Cretaceous (145 million to 66 million years ago), northeastern Thailand would have been a semi-arid environment, and N. chaiyaphumensis would have used its long body and large surface area to shed heat and keep cool. The fossil site was likely part of a river system during that time, so N. chaiyaphumensis would have lived alongside crocodiles, fish and fish-eating pterosaurs.

The fossils were embedded in the youngest rocks in Thailand that still contain dinosaur fossils. Though additional rock layers accumulated atop the N. chaiyaphumensis fossils, the specific conditions later in the Cretaceous period probably prevented the formation of later dinosaur fossils, the researchers said.

"Younger rocks laid down towards the end of the time of the dinosaurs are unlikely to contain dinosaur remains because the region by then had become a shallow sea," Sethapanichsakul said. "So this may be the last or most recent large sauropod we will find in Southeast Asia."

How much do you know about the king of the dinosaurs? Test your knowledge with our T. rex quiz!