For the first time in a century, scientists have identified a new cat species, thanks to genetic analysis — and it's resolved a long-standing debate about the cat family tree.

The newly identified species, Leopardus tilcayo, is a type of tiger cat ‪—‬ a small, spotted wild cat ‪—‬ that lives in the Yungas cloud forest region of Bolivia. The analysis also revealed a subspecies of another tiger cat species, named Leopardus tigrinus antisuyo, which lives in Peru.

Previously thought to be a northern tiger cat (Leopardus tigrinus), L. tilcayo split off from other Leopardus species 1.4 million years ago, the study found. This makes it the first novel living cat species to be discovered in over a century, since the Uruguayan pampas cat (Leopardus fasciatus) was described in 1923. The name L. tilcayo refers to what locals call the cat, "tilcayo."

Descriptions of L. tilcayo are based on only two live individuals in Bolivia: one specimen caught and photographed in the wild, and another living in captivity. These small cats weigh 3 to 4 pounds (1.5 to 2 kilograms) and reach up to 20 inches (50 centimeters) without their tail, with the tail adding about 10 inches (25 cm). The male L. tilcayo in captivity, nicknamed Tigrino, is the species' "type specimen" — an individual that acts as the reference for the whole species.

"It's smaller than a house cat," Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, a biologist and co-author of the new study, told Live Science. Nogales-Ascarrunz works with Senda Verde, a refuge in Bolivia for trafficked wildlife where Tigrino lives. Tigrino arrived about 10 years ago, Nogales-Ascarrunz said. "It didn't look like the other [cats]," Nogales-Ascarrunz said, "but we didn't expect a new species itself."

"Highly contentious" cat family tree

L. tilcayo and L. tigrinus antisuyo form part of a long-contested tiger cat family tree that the new genetic analysis has resolved.

The tiger cat was first described in 1775 in French Guiana. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, European naturalists came across tiger cats in various South American countries and assigned them different species names.

In the 20th century, taxonomists began lumping all tiger cats together into one species, L. tigrinus. Tiger cat species look very similar; they are distinguishable only by genetic analysis or small differences in markings.

Over the past decade, modern genomic techniques have enabled scientists to differentiate and validate tiger cat species. In 2013, scientists split tiger cats into two species, with L. tigrinus classified as the northern tiger cat and Leopardus guttulus as the southern tiger cat. The eastern tiger cat (Leopardus emiliae) was proposed as a separate species in 2017, and the clouded tiger cat (Leopardus pardinoides) split off in 2024.

Yet there were limited genetic data on L. tigrinus. The tiger cat's family tree has been "highly contentious and poorly understood," Fabio Oliveira do Nascimento, taxonomist at the Museum of Zoology at the University of São Paulo in Brazil who was not involved with the new study, told Live Science.

In the new study, published Thursday (Sept. 17) in the journal Current Biology, researchers sequenced and analyzed the complete genomes of 38 cat samples from South and Central America, including eight from museum specimens. They examined teeth, bones, muscle tissue, skin and fur from cats across Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Suriname, Guyana and Venezuela.

By comparing these genomes, the researchers were able to map the history of the lineage and when the species diverged. They concluded that the group referred to collectively as tiger cats actually comprises five distinct species, verifying four that had previously been proposed — L. guttulus, L. emiliae, L. pardinoides and L. tigrinus — and naming one new species, L. tilcayo. The team also identified one new subspecies of L. tigrinus, called L. tigrinus antisuyo.

The findings clarify the long-debated tiger cat family tree, Nascimento said. "Our understanding of the natural history, evolution and taxonomy of the group has begun to become clearer, resolving long-standing questions while raising new ones," Nascimento noted.

Because L. tilcayo is a new species, scientists don't know much about its behavior, diet or range, Nogales-Ascarrunz said. The next steps are to get more accurate numbers of their populations and estimates of their ranges.

The IUCN Red List currently classifies the northern tiger cat and southern tiger cat as vulnerable species with decreasing populations, but these risk categories could now change.

"Species that are currently considered 'vulnerable' under the single label of 'northern tiger cat' may increase to 'endangered' when assessed on their own," Jonas Lescroart, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Antwerp in Belgium and co-author of the new study, told Live Science. Accurate population numbers can help governments and environmental agencies implement targeted conservation strategies.

Tiger cats are threatened by deforestation, wildlife trafficking and diseases transmitted by domestic dogs. "This discovery is definitely expected to increase conservation attention — or, we hope so," Lescroart said.

Think you know about lions and tigers? Test your smarts with our big cat quiz!

Tyrannosaurus rex was a hottie with a body temperature similar to our own, according to a new analysis of their teeth.

The finding supports the idea that T. rex was a fast, energetic predator and scavenger, not an animal that basked in the sun to gain energy like most modern-day reptiles.

T. rex, which lived between about 68 million and 66 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period (143.1 million to 66 million years ago), was one of the largest carnivorous dinosaurs that ever lived.

Previous studies have already suggested that T. rex and its relatives were warm blooded, but now scientists have estimated the dinosaur's body temperature for the first time by studying different isotopes, or forms, of the same chemical elements in the enamel of three T. rex teeth from specimens found in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana.

Rare, heavy isotopes of carbon and oxygen bond together differently in growing tooth enamel depending on the temperature. The number of bonds formed between these rare isotopes is greater at cooler temperatures than it is at warmer temperatures, which means warm-blooded, or endothermic animals, that can regulate their own body temperature, have fewer of these chemical bonds in their teeth than cold-blooded, or ectothermic, animals, which rely on their environment for warmth.

By measuring the bonds in carbon dioxide (CO₂) given off when dissolving small samples from the T. rex teeth, Randon Flores, a geologist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and his colleagues could estimate where on the scale of animal body temperatures T. rex sat.

They put the T. rex body temperature at 97.3 degrees Fahrenheit (36.3 degrees Celsius), comparable to that of a human or an elephant. Modern, cold-blooded reptiles tend to have lower body temperatures of about 82-86 F (28-30 C), while most birds — descendants from T. rex's branch of dinosaurs — tend to be much warmer at 104-109 F (40-43 C). Therefore, these findings, published Wednesday (Sept. 16) in the journal Science Advances, show how much this relative of modern birds had already diverged from cold-blooded dinosaurs like Triceratops and Stegosaurus.

"The temperature is about what I would have guessed — higher than a reptile or a slow mammal like a sloth, but lower than an avian," study co-author Robert Eagle, a geobiologist at UCLA, said in a statement.

These findings have implications for how and where the T. rex might have lived. A warm-blooded T. rex would have been an energetic, active animal, chasing or scavenging food to fuel its fast metabolism rather than basking in the sun to gain energy, wrote the authors.

It also means that during the Cretaceous period, one of the warmest periods in Earth’s history, about 11-25 F (6-14 C) warmer than today, T. rex would have been able to survive in most of the North American continent, from what is now Mexico up to chilly climates where cold-blooded reptiles wouldn’t have survived. This helps explain why a tyrannosaur fossil has been found in the Kikak-Tegoseak Quarry in Alaska, although there is no trace of other reptiles like lizards, turtles or crocodiles from that period in the region.

The ability for T. rex to inhabit cooler, high latitudes also aligns with recent evidence that tyrannosaurs crossed the Bering Land Bridge between Asia and North America, write the authors.

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

In an extraordinary first-of-its-kind video, researchers have documented a humpback whale mom grieving her stillborn calf.

The footage was recorded off the coast of southeastern Australia in July 2025, according to a study published Wednesday (Sept. 16) in the journal Discover Animals. In the clip, a female humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) hovers above her baby's motionless body on the seafloor and tries to make eye contact with the newborn, as if to check for signs of life.

"It is extremely rare to witness," study first author Olaf Meynecke, a marine ecologist at Griffith University in Australia, told Live Science in an email. "Only about 20 births of humpback whales have been observed to date and described in literature," none of which involved a stillborn calf.

Unlike the babies of toothed whales and porpoises, newborn humpback whales don't have enough blubber to float, so they sink without the help of an adult whale. This might partly explain why scientists had not witnessed a stillbirth in this species until now, Meynecke said, as the lifeless body sinks to the seabed immediately after birth and is almost impossible to spot from a distance.

The video was taken after study co-author Andrew Mulville, who was on a private boat that morning, noticed two adult humpback whales milling about at the surface of the water. One of the whales adopted a vertical position with its tail pointing up. Moments later, Mulville saw the remains of an amniotic membrane, the inner layer of the placental bag that envelops a fetus, floating on the water.

The whale had obviously just given birth, but there was no sign of the calf. So Mulville and others on the boat followed the female underwater with a GoPro camera. They found the calf dead on the seafloor, while the mother displayed what the study authors interpreted as "postmortem attentive behavior," or grieving.

"She was repeatedly diving down for short times and swimming next to the calf, then resting next to it on the floor for about a minute, even moving the pectoral fin over the calf, then diving up again," Meynecke said. This behavior lasted for at least 90 minutes and possibly days, although the researchers left the scene after about two hours of observation.

The mother did not try to bring the calf's body to the surface, possibly because she realized that it had died during birth. This is different from the postmortem attentive behavior of toothed whales, which researchers have previously seen pushing stillborn babies above the water, according to the study.

The other adult whale on the scene was an "escort" supporting the pregnant female as she prepared to give birth, Meynecke said. Based on the escort's size and appearance, it was likely a female of a similar age to the mom, but the researchers did not confirm this. Male and female escorts are common in humpback whales; they usually travel with females and their calves during migration and assist females during pregnancy.

Grieving behavior suggests that humpback whales have an inherent, strong maternal attachment to their calves. Grief is difficult to demonstrate due to the lack of physiological or neurological measurements. However, the whale mom sought close proximity with her calf during the observation time, and the adult whales were spotted swimming in the area for the next two days, suggesting they were emotionally invested in the death, according to the study.

"It provides a rare window into the behavioural response of baleen [filter-feeding] whales toward a deceased member of their species but also in this case of a mother toward her calf," Meynecke said. "It provides important insight into the complex behaviours of the species and aligns with other observations of care taking, assisting distressed whales or even protecting other species from predators."

Paleontologists have identified the first confirmed remains of Diplodocus — "Dippy," for short — outside the western U.S., revealing that the iconic long-necked dinosaur reached what is now Spain roughly 150 million years ago.

The findings show that the enormous sauropod didn't live only in North America, as was long thought. Instead, it may have rambled across a land bridge all the way to Europe, the new study suggests.

The discovery, made at the La Tejería site near the small village of El Castellar in eastern Spain, provides some of the strongest fossil evidence yet that dinosaurs could move between North America and Europe during the Late Jurassic, when the Atlantic Ocean was still in its early stages of opening after the breakup of the supercontinent Pangaea. The researchers published their findings Tuesday (Sept. 15) in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

"Paleontological studies like this one help us better understand the history of life on Earth, reconstruct ancient ecosystems, and understand how they changed through time," study first author Sergio Sánchez Fenollosa, a doctoral student who studies biodiversity and evolutionary biology at the Joint Paleontology Foundation Teruel-Dinópolis (Dinópolis Foundation), a paleontological research institution, told Live Science via email.

A sauropod in Spain

Dippy is one of the best-known dinosaurs. After its fossils made their grand debut at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh in the early 1900s, life-size fossil replicas of the towering herbivore were sent around the world, including to England, France, Spain, Argentina and Russia.

But until now, Diplodocus' Late Jurassic fossils were known only from the Morrison Formation in the western United States ‪—‬ and the latest discovery shows that Dippy wasn't a homebody.

The newly unearthed Diplodocus specimen consists of 14 well-preserved tail vertebrae and several chevrons ‪—‬ bones that helped support blood vessels and muscles within the dinosaur's tail.

Study co-author and managing director of the Dinópolis Foundation, Alberto Cobos, said it was a friend who "thought he had spotted some bones on a mountainside," Cobos told Live Science via email. "That very day, I went to the site near El Castellar (a village in the province of Teruel). Sure enough, we saw a couple of sauropod vertebral centers."

Although only part of the skeleton has been recovered, the bones show a series of characteristics associated with Diplodocus, including large cavities corresponding to where air sacs would have been, along with deep grooves running alongside the underside of the tailbones.

"It was an exciting and continuous process of seeing the pieces of the puzzle gradually fall into place," Sánchez Fenollosa said in a statement. "From the early stages of the osteological study, we noticed strong similarities with several diplodocine sauropods … With each new result, the picture became clearer: we were looking at a Diplodocus."

It's unclear which species of Diplodocus the new specimen is, but like others of its genus, it was a huge dinosaur with an extremely long neck and whip-like tail.

"The Diplodocus from El Castellar was approximately 25 meters [82 feet] long (comparable in size to its North American relatives), making it another of the giant sauropods of the Spanish Jurassic," Cobos said in the statement.

An ancient bridge

Between 195 million and 170 million years ago, the supercontinent Pangaea broke apart as the Atlantic Ocean opened. But the ocean was much narrower than it is today, and the continents were not necessarily as isolated as their modern geography is now.

Evidence indicates that temporary land bridges may have allowed some animals to move between the two regions. The most famous prehistoric land bridge is the Bering Land Bridge that humans used to move between Asia and what is now Alaska. Previous research showed the Bering Land Bridge also existed around 68 million years ago, and it may have allowed an Asian ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex to trek into North America.

One possible route for Diplodocus into Spain may have been a land bridge that connected what is now Newfoundland with the Iberian Peninsula.

Geological conditions may have allowed dinosaurs like Diplodocus to move between continents, Sánchez Fenollosa told Live Science in an email. "This interpretation is supported not only by the fossil record but also by geological evidence," he said.

The newfound Diplodocus fossils also suggest that the distribution of giant sauropods was more complicated than the fossil record previously indicated.

"More complete specimens will be essential to understand this story in greater detail, particularly to determine which Diplodocus species inhabited Europe: whether it was one already known from North America or a previously unknown species," Sánchez Fenollosa said. "This discovery reminds us that even for such iconic dinosaurs, there are still many unanswered questions about their evolutionary history and biogeography."

In a multicat household, it's common to see one cat licking another. When some people see this behavior, known as allogrooming ("allo" means "another individual"), they assume it's a sign of friendship.

But is that really the case? Are there hidden, more complex reasons for why cats lick each other?

While research into allogrooming is ongoing, scientists have suggested different explanations for why cats lick each other, including some social reasons and some more practical ones.

Social bonding or social tension?

The historical view, based on observations of free-roaming-cat colonies, was that allogrooming is a sign of affection and helps cats create and maintain bonds with other cats in their social group, perhaps by creating a shared group smell.

But a 1998 study of 25 cats living together in an indoor-outdoor enclosure poked holes in this theory. The study found that aggressive behavior showed up in about 35% of allogrooming sessions, which suggested that allogrooming might not be about friendship. Instead, the authors proposed, it may help to defuse a tense situation in a confined space, where an actual fight would be too risky.

To investigate, Morgane Van Belle, a cat behavior scientist at Ghent University in Belgium, and her colleagues analyzed videos of allogrooming from 53 two-cat homes. They concluded that allogrooming may have different social functions, depending on the situation.

The team noticed that the cats sometimes licked each other while huddling together and copying one another's body postures. In these moments, allogrooming probably helps strengthen social bonds, the researchers proposed. Most licking was directed toward the ears; this may help cats relax because the skin there is rich in sensory nerve endings, Van Belle said. Allogrooming produces a relaxing effect in other animals too. For example, it lowers the heart rate in horses and triggers the release of feel-good hormones in monkeys.

They also noted that allogrooming sometimes led to friendly wrestling, in which the cats grabbed each other with their front legs and tumbled around. This suggests that allogrooming may serve as a signal to start play.

In other situations, however, the researchers noticed that allogrooming was followed by behaviors linked to conflict, such as turning the ears backward, pawing, and biting. In these cases, one cat would stand or lean over the other, and both cats showed subtle signs of stress like lip licking, head shaking or self-scratching.

Based on these observations, Van Belle's team think that allogrooming may be an "appeasement signal" in fraught moments that could lead to conflict or injury, for example, when one cat wants to take over a sleeping spot already occupied by another. They think it possible that the licking helps to calm things down and keeps a spat from turning into a real fight. Similar behavior has been seen in meerkats, where subordinate individuals groom dominant ones to placate them.

Yet because this licking often targets the neck — the same area cats bite during fights — it also may signal a subtle aggressive threat, the researchers suggested.

Hygiene and grooming

Van Belle and her colleagues think that, beyond sending social signals, allogrooming may help with hygiene. After all, it's often aimed at the head and neck ‪—‬ the areas that are "least accessible for the cat itself during grooming," Van Belle said. Allogrooming is thought to have a hygienic function in other species too. For example, ants achieve colony-level hygiene by grooming heavily infected individuals more, and primates concentrate their grooming on body parts the recipient can't easily reach. When it comes to cats, however, more research is needed. Van Belle's study did not measure parasites, infections or skin cleanliness to see whether such grooming actually reduces dirt or bugs.

Dr. Terry Curtis, a veterinary behaviorist who has studied how often allogrooming happens, also thinks cats might groom each other for hygiene reasons. She wonders whether feral cats, who likely carry more fleas than house cats, might have a different allogrooming pattern.

The explanations proposed by Van Belle and colleagues are reasonable but not definitive, Curtis said. Because so many factors can shape a cat's behavior, she's skeptical that researchers will ever be able to say with real confidence exactly why one cat grooms another.

After working as a veterinary behaviorist for 25 years, Curtis has concluded it is often impossible to understand what's going on in a cat's mind.

"Congratulations, you got a cat," she said. "Let the mystery begin.”

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

An exceptionally well-preserved fossilized molar belonging to an adult Pacific mastodon has surfaced in a nature preserve near San Francisco.

Upon first glance, the ancient tooth looked like an "oddly shaped rock" to geologists who were conducting fieldwork in the area, according to a statement from the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space (Midpen), which runs the preserve. But the find was quickly unmasked as a valuable fossil from the last ice age and was sent to scientists at Stanford University for carbon dating.

"The tooth itself is in immaculate condition," Wayne Thompson, a paleontologist and the CEO of Pacific Paleontology, a consulting firm that carried out a preliminary analysis, said in the statement. "It's the most complete mastodon molar from our area, and the most spectacular mastodon molar that I've ever seen. I had chills and shivers up and down my spine."

Brigid Lynch, a geomorphologist with the California-based hydrology consulting firm Balance Hydrologics, found the molar this summer while surveying a creek bed. "As a geologist, I've gone out and seen stuff in the field, but definitely nothing as exciting as this," Lynch said in the statement.

Lynch's team was working on a habitat enhancement project to support the threatened California red-legged frog (Rana draytonii) inside the preserve, which is located on the San Francisco Peninsula in San Mateo County. The fossil was a complete surprise and dates to at least 10,000 years ago, when the Pacific mastodon (Mammut pacificus) is thought to have gone extinct.

The Pacific mastodon was first recognized as a species in 2019. It was closely related to the American mastodon (Mammut americanum). Both elephant-like creatures lived in North America during the Pleistocene epoch (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago), but the Pacific mastodon inhabited regions farther west than its cousin, roaming parts of present-day Mexico, California, Oregon and the northern Rocky Mountains of the western U.S., according to the statement.

Pacific and American mastodon fossils reveal slight differences between the species, including a narrower third molar, thicker hind-leg bones and occasionally absent lower-jaw tusks in the Pacific mastodon, according to the Royal Alberta Museum.

The newfound tooth is "another puzzle in the Ice Age saga that we can put into place," Thompson said. To get a precise date for the fossil, Midpen donated it to Stanford University's Doerr School of Sustainability in July, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Researchers will produce a 3D copy of the molar that Midpen plans to use for public outreach and education, according to the statement.

A bizarre squid has been filmed haunting the northeastern Pacific Ocean for the first time.

Researchers spotted the bigfin squid (Magnapinna) via remote video while using an uncrewed submersible to explore underwater mountains, known as seamounts, at a depth of more than 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) off the coast of California.

The footage, captured Aug. 7, represents the first confirmed live observation of a bigfin squid in the northeastern Pacific, according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), whose scientists made the discovery with collaborators from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Olívia Soares Pereira, a deep-sea ecologist and postdoctoral fellow at MBARI, said the squid was hovering over the seafloor with its arms and tentacles bent at a 90-degree angle — what the researchers called the "elbow pose."

"Based on the behavior of other deep-sea squids, we believe this pose could be a part of their feeding tactics," Pereira told Live Science in an email. "The arms and tentacles are extended so they do not get tangled up and passively capture prey that sticks to them."

Bigfin squid are the deepest-dwelling known squid and have been found more than 20,000 feet (6,000 m) below the surface. Most of the animals' total length comes from their tentacles and arms, which can be 20 times longer than their bodies. The individual in the video was about 4.1 feet (1.25 m) long, including body, tentacles and arms, according to MBARI.

The last time MBARI researchers encountered a bigfin squid was off Hawaii in 2001, though around 70 have been observed or collected in total, according to MBARI. Pereira said she saw two other bigfin squid during an expedition to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge — located along the Atlantic Ocean floor — with the Schmidt Ocean Institute earlier this year.

"When we saw this one, I couldn't believe my luck!" she added.

The team was piloting MBARI's Doc Ricketts submersible when they encountered the squid near the Davidson Seamount at a depth of around 10,751 feet (3,277 m), about 80 miles (130 kilometers) southwest of Monterey, during a 10-day Seamount Hotspots expedition between Aug. 3 and Aug. 12.

The researchers were investigating life around the Davidson Seamount and Sur Ridge, which are biodiversity hotspots within the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, a massive federally protected area off central California. Although these areas are known to be teeming with life, a bigfin squid was not on the list of animals the researchers expected to see.

"We were looking for thriving communities of deep-sea corals and sponges, brooding deep-sea octopus, and feeding beaked whales," Pereira said. "Finding a rare animal that we weren't specifically looking for highlights the incredible diversity and habitat complexity of this region."

Nearly two millennia ago, a wealthy Roman commissioned an intricate, multicolored floor mosaic that depicted two beloved household animals: a cat named Emerald and a dog named Ocean. The mosaic was a key feature of a villa, which archaeologists recently unearthed from beneath the ancient city of Adramytteion on Turkey's Aegean coast.

Within the Roman villa, which has been dated to the late second to third centuries A.D., archaeologists discovered three halls surrounding a central atrium. In one room, which likely functioned as the villa's main reception hall, archaeologists found a colorful mosaic with 15 separate panels depicting living and mythological creatures.

In a study forthcoming in the Journal of Mosaic Research, archaeologist Hüseyin Özgen, head of the Adramytteion research team at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, wrote that the 15 panels are centered around what appears to be a depiction of Medusa, while the named cat and dog may preserve the memory of household creatures.

Özgen began excavating at Adramytteion in 2012, but he and his team discovered the Roman villa only recently and excavated it in 2025 and early 2026. In the Roman period, Adramytteion was a provincial capital within Asia Minor and a prime trading spot due to its location at the head of a gulf on the Aegean Sea. The impressive villa included three mosaic-paved halls, a number of secondary rooms, and a network of pipes and drains that may have connected to a latrine.

Visitors approaching from the courtyard of the villa would have been greeted by the largest, most elaborate mosaic in the residence, according to Özgen. Located in the middle of the room, the mosaic measures about 16.4 by 11.8 feet (5 by 3.6 meters) and contains 15 panels arranged in three rows. Most of the panels depict birds, fish and felines, but two mythologically inspired panels include a gorgon (possibly Medusa) and a winged horse (possibly Pegasus). Ancient artists used white, black, red, orange, yellow, pink, burgundy, blue, turquoise and green tiles to create the intricate design.

Only two of the animals depicted in the mosaic are named. As someone entered the room, the first mosaic panel they would have seen to their left was a pale cat seated on a blue-green cushion, Özgen wrote in the study. Above the cat are the Greek letters ΖΜΑΡΑΓΔΙΝ (Zmaragdin), meaning emerald. The relaxed cat sitting on a cushion suggests that Emerald may have been a pet rather than a stray.

One possible explanation for Emerald's name may be a link to the desert of Roman Egypt, where emeralds were mined in antiquity; the villa owner may have been a merchant with North African connections.

On the right side as someone entered the room was a mosaic panel depicting a running or leaping dog. This animal is labeled with the Greek letters ΩΚΕΑΝΟΣ (Okeanos), meaning ocean. Adramytteion was a harbor city, so Ocean's name may have been bestowed due to his surroundings, according to Özgen.

Emerald and Ocean were likely familiar to the villa's residents, even if they weren't specifically pets, Özgen wrote, and their depictions in the mosaic may have functioned as familiar signs of ownership and household identity.

Research at Adramytteion by Özgen and the project team is ongoing.

From Augustus to Nero, see how much you know about ancient Rome's famous leaders with our Roman emperor quiz!

A sunken World War II hospital ship off the coast of Albania has attracted both invasive devil firefish and rare Mediterranean monk seals, leading researchers to weigh the risks and benefits of these wrecks for local ecosystems.

The ship, called the Po, sank off Vlora Bay in 1941 after being hit by a torpedo from a British Fairey Swordfish aircraft during the Greco-Italian War, one of the conflicts within World War II. It is now acting as an artificial reef, with over 80% of its surface teeming with marine life, researchers reported July 27 in the journal Frontiers in Ocean Sustainability.

This phenomenon, by which submerged structures attract marine life, is called the artificial reef effect, and it occurs when marine life colonizes a newly introduced solid structure underwater. These structures can provide shelter because crevices and dens serve as hiding places, as well as food from the algae and other organisms that grow on its surface.

While there has been research on Vlora Bay generally, there was no historical biological or quantitative data for the Po wreck itself. The new study sought to find out more about how the ship's structure affected the surrounding seabed and how marine organisms have colonized it.

Devil firefish (Pterois miles) are native to warm coastal waters and coral reefs of the West Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. However, the new study found these fish swimming around the shipwreck off the coast of Albania, around 800 miles (1,300 kilometres) away, between June 2022 and September 2024, with up to seven individuals observed simultaneously. The study authors suggested that shipwrecks like Po could be attracting these invasive animals from their natural habitat toward more temperate waters.

“Unfortunately, I can't call it a true scientific surprise, because the effects of climate change are now sadly well known and predictable," Simone Modugno, a biologist and scientific diver at the University of Ferrara in Italy and co-author of the study, told Live Science. "What's perhaps most surprising is the speed with which these climate changes are occurring, acting as a driver and amplifier for the incursions of tropical and alien organisms. I'm talking about impressive salinity and abnormally high temperatures, with persistent peaks of extreme heat."

The researchers noted that the presence of these fish is part of a wider problem: More invasive species are migrating from the Red Sea through the Suez Canal and into the Adriatic Sea due to warming global temperatures. Modugno said she expects a "serious problem" involving the devil firefish within the next 10 years.

"For at least three years, I've observed a steady and unstoppable increase in fish such as Pterois miles along the Albanian coast, as well as other invasive plant species, mollusks, and shellfish, as well as the spontaneous return of the Mediterranean monk seal," Modugno said. "Now, the Albanian coasts are experiencing constant overgrazing, just like the Greek and sub-Italian coasts, and the lionfish population is literally exploding.”

The study confirmed that this was one of the northernmost reported occurrences of the firefish in the Adriatic Sea.

However, invasive species aren't the only ones attracted to these shipwrecks. The researchers also noted 28 fish species living around the wreck, egg clusters belonging to the Ommastrephidae family of squid, and even sightings of the rare Mediterranean monk seal (Monachus monachus).

Most notably, researchers captured a monk seal resting within the sheltered cavities of the wreck in August 2023, which was the first confirmed sighting of the species in Vlora Bay since 1996.

This monk seal species typically breeds in sheltered sea caves across Mediterranean beaches. However, tourism and other human activities have forced the species into more isolated and dangerous caves. This, along with other threats from fishing entanglement, continue to threaten the seals. The sighting indicates that monk seals are using these artificial reefs as potential resting opportunities when their natural habitats are fragmented, the researchers said in the study.

Scientists have uncovered an ancient shark "graveyard" in the middle of the Egyptian desert.

Fossilized teeth from seven shark species dating back millions of years were discovered in the Abu-Tartur Plateau ‪—‬ located in Egypt's Western Desert ‪—‬ between 2020 and 2022, offering new insight into the desert's watery past. The researchers detailed their discovery in a study published Aug. 18 in the journal Cretaceous Research

"This study provides evidence that the area now occupied by the plateau was once a sea with flourished marine life, with environmental conditions suitable for its development and prosperity, including favourable temperatures, sunlight, and appropriate oxygen levels," study first author Tarek Yassin, a paleontologist at Cairo University in Egypt, told Live Science in an email.

During the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago), temperatures on Earth were generally warmer than they are today, with sea levels up to 558 feet (170 meters) higher than they are now, according to the Natural History Museum in London. As a result, shallow seas formed in areas that are now fairly dry, including the Egyptian desert.

The Abu-Tartur Plateau lies along the Duwi Formation, a Late Cretaceous geological rock formation that spans Egypt's Eastern and Western deserts. Previous research had already uncovered fossils of fish, sea turtles and other marine reptiles in this region, hinting at the thriving ocean ecosystem that once existed there. The rocks are also rich in phosphorite, a type of sedimentary rock that often forms from the shells and bones of marine animals.

"We had conducted research before our expedition and knew that areas rich in phosphate deposits could also contain fossils of vertebrate marine organisms," Yassin said, adding that finding the shark fossils was an "exciting surprise."

Yassin and colleagues had previously found fossilized teeth from two types of mackerel shark, but further expeditions between 2020 and 2022 uncovered 14 more fossilized teeth belonging to at least five additional shark species. One of these species, Scapanorhynchus raphiodon, an ancient relative of present-day goblin sharks (Mitsukurina owstoni), had never been reported in Africa before. Another two,Serratolamna serrata and Squalicorax bassanii, had never been seen in Egypt.

"Finding teeth belonging to seven different shark species was particularly remarkable, especially because they were all discovered in the same location, in the middle of an entire plateau," Yassin said. "This discovery is more than simply a large assemblage of shark fossils."

The existence of so many shark species in the same area suggests it was once home to a nutrient-rich, complex ecosystem, with plenty of smaller fish to feed these apex predators. However, the discovery doesn't necessarily mean these sharks coexisted; rather, their remains may have become jumbled together in the same sediment over time, the study authors noted.

The team plans to continue their research in the Abu-Tartur Plateau and explore the surrounding area. "We believe there is still much more to discover," Yassin said.

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

Every person you know has a name, and you've likely given one to your pets, too. But are names a uniquely human feature, or do other animals also call each other by name?

Research suggests that some mammals and birds use vocal labels for other individuals, but not all scientists agree on how to interpret the evidence.

In the 1960s, scientists discovered that young bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops) create individually distinctive whistles, called signature whistles. Researchers in the years since have conducted experiments in which they played the whistles through an underwater speaker and observed how the dolphins responded. Dolphins copy the signature whistles of other dolphins to initiate contact, similarly to how we use names, and can recognize other individual dolphins based on the frequency and "shape" of the whistle, regardless of the voice of the dolphin whistling.

Dolphins do seem to assign these whistles to other individuals and to match the whistles to others in a more symbolic way, Kelly Jaakkola, a cognitive psychologist at the Dolphin Research Center in Florida, told Live Science. Research shows that dolphins whistle to identify each other within complex social systems and while cooperating on tasks.

Through playback experiments, researchers also found that wild African elephants (Loxodonta) address one another with specific vocalizations ‪—‬ low rumbling sounds that are unique to each individual. The team published their findings in 2024 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

"They sound a little bit like a giant cat purring," Michael Pardo, a behavioral ecologist at Colorado State University and first author of the study, told Live Science. Elephants tended to approach speakers more quickly, and vocalize more in response, when their "name" was played.

Playback experiments have also suggested that spectacled parrotlets (Forpus conspicillatus), small parrots native to parts of South and Central America, use vocal labels for other parrotlets.

Studies of birds in captivity can shed light on their capacity to learn vocal labels. In a survey of parrot owners, about half of the 800 birds used vocal labels for individual people and animals that they had learned from the people around them.

"Parrots certainly pick up a lot of things from humans — they don't necessarily know what it means in a human linguistic context, but they know when to say it," Lauryn Benedict, a biologist at the University of Northern Colorado and first author of the study that surveyed parrot owners, told Live Science.

One survey participant said their parrot corrects people when called by the wrong name; others said their parrots correctly used the names of all humans and dogs in the household. However, these behaviors look different from those in wild parrots, and further research is needed to dig into whether spectacled parrotlets understand the concept of names and actually give names to their fellow birds.

How do you define a name?

Claiming an animal noise is a name, as humans define it –– a specific, symbolic vocal label attached to an individual –– is complicated.

One study in marmosets suggests that they use vocal labels. Using playback experiments, the researchers discovered that the marmosets directed certain vocalizations at specific individuals and that they learned these vocalizations from family members. However, in a published response to that study, Jaakkola argued that the calls may not be name-like, since they were correctly identified only 16% to 61% of the time. Jaakkola proposed that the marmosets may have been imitating each other's vocalizations.

However, she noted that we can't generalize any one interpretation to all species.

"The elephant case is very different from the marmoset case and the spectacled parrotlet case," Jaakkola said. "It can be really hard to have a cohesive discussion [across species] ... to all talk about the same thing."

In a July 2026 paper, Jaakkola and colleagues proposed three minimum criteria to apply across species: individual reference, meaning the call is designated for one particular individual; symbolic representation, meaning the name stands for a specific individual in the user's mind; and shared meaning, where at least two individuals associate the name with that individual.

When applying these criteria to the current evidence, Jaakkola said bottlenose dolphins show the strongest evidence for the use of animal names. Elephants, parrots and marmosets, on the other hand, require more research about symbolic representation to prove naming behavior.

"It is a big claim when you call something a name," Jaakkola said. "Our goal here was to create a unified framework … to start looking at this question more systematically."

Why are names useful?

Species that may use name-like calls have a couple traits in common: They can learn new sounds, and they're extremely social. Names might be useful in animal groups in which the community breaks into smaller subgroups and individuals are often out of their companions' sight, Pardo said.

The behavior seems present in very different lineages, so it may have evolved separately multiple times, which can tell scientists about the evolution of language among complex social pressures, Pardo said.

By studying whether animals use names, scientists can learn about the cognitive abilities necessary for abstract mental representation of other individuals. "For humans, names are such a part of our individuality and our sense of self, that if animals have names and respond to those names, that suggests they could have a sense of self … and of other individuals and their individuality," Benedict said.

Jaakkola clarified that although it's difficult to demonstrate naming behavior in nature, she's not ruling out that nonhuman animals have name-like calls. Rather, the evidence is not yet sufficient to say they do, she said.

Pardo agrees that more evidence would confirm these behaviors in more species, but he suspects a lot of animals may be calling each other by name.

A lot of other animals, such as baboons, giraffes, and crows, have communities that break into smaller groups. While there isn't evidence for names in species like these, and this social structure would need to be paired with vocal learning abilities, "I think it might be more common than we currently realize," Pardo said.

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

Cats can identify each other based on the scent of their pee, and researchers have just decoded the secret "messages" that make that possible.

A group of chemicals called branched-chain fatty acids (BFAs) help give cats their unique scent marks, a new study found. Unusual fat droplets in the cats' kidneys likely help them maintain that chemical fingerprint in each mark. The researchers reported their findings Aug.ust 19 in the journal Current Biology.

While most animals use a combination of visual, audible and scent-related cues to recognize each other, some also rely on specific chemical signatures. A number of insects, for example, use certain hydrocarbons to determine whether other insects are part of the same colony, and mice excrete urinary proteins that provide identifying information about the individual that left them. But not much is known about how other mammals leave unique scent marks that remain stable over time.

"The way I think of the mouse proteins is kind of equivalent to a human face," said Michael Sheehan, a neurobiologist at Cornell University who was not involved in the study. While a person might recognize someone they know well from less obvious signals such as their hairstyle or the way they walk, people typically recognize others by their faces. "My hunch is probably these branched-chain fatty acids from the cat urine [are] the same deal," Sheehan told Live Science.

In the new study, the researchers investigated domestic cats' flehmen response ‪—‬ an odd, open-mouthed expression many cat owners will recognize. The flehmen response is an innate behavior that draws certain chemicals into a cat's vomeronasal organ when it is investigating interesting odors. The vomeronasal organ helps cats detect pheromones and certain other chemicals in their environment.

The researchers found that cats showed the flehmen response less often, on average, the more they encountered the same urine sample from another cat, but the response increased when urine from a new cat was introduced.

"I found it surprising that an innate behavior could be so strongly influenced by familiarity and learning, rather than being a simple fixed response to a single pheromone," study co-author Masao Miyazaki, a biomolecular scientist at Iwate University in Japan, told Live Science in an email.

The team then used a technique known as high-performance liquid chromatography to split a sample of cat urine into its components, and then showed the cats each part of this sample. Cats consistently showed the flehmen response when they smelled a portion that contained a handful of branched-chain fatty acids.

Each cat had a unique mix of BCFAs in its urine, and these BFAs remained stable for at least a day after the cat left a scent mark, the scientists found. This suggested BFAs could leave information about the cat that made the mark, even after the rest of the urine had evaporated.

The team found BCFAs in lipid (fat) droplets in the renal cortex, the outer part of the kidney. Researchers have known for more than a century that these droplets exist in cat kidneys, but their purpose was unclear. The droplets could act as reservoirs that keep a cat's individual BCFA profile constant even after dietary or health changes, the scientists proposed in the study.

Large cats, including lions and tigers, also have BFAs and lipid droplets in their renal cortices. The specific BCFAs and the number of droplets differed among species, however, which suggests that these features may have diversified as cats evolved.

"We now want to understand how these lipid droplets are formed, maintained, mobilized and linked to secretion into urine," Miyazaki said. "We are also very interested in whether disruption of these processes contributes to chronic kidney disease in cats."

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

If you've ever been jolted awake by your cat letting out a long, mournful cry in the middle of the night, your sleep-deprived brain may wonder why, exactly, your cute little pet yowls all the time.

The answer isn't as simple as "they want food" or "they're being dramatic." The sound people commonly call a yowl can actually mean very different things depending on the situation, and even cat behavior experts don't always agree on exactly what qualifies as a yowl.

In veterinary medicine, the term often refers to loud, harsh vocalizations associated with aggression or mating between cats. But many pet owners use "yowling" to describe almost any loud cry their cat makes at home, she said.

That distinction matters, because context is often the biggest clue to what a cat is trying to communicate.

"If you're talking about a yowl in the strict sense, it's usually linked to a strong negative emotional state," said Charlotte de Mouzon, a cat behavior researcher and ethologist at Paris Nanterre University in France. "It represents an emotion that is intense and negative."

In other words, a true yowl is less like casual conversation and more like an emotional alarm bell.

An ancient warning system

That alarm bell may be older than the house cat (Felis catus) itself and likely predates domestication entirely, said Jay Schwartz, a professor of psychological sciences and head of the Evolution of Emotional Communication Lab at Western Oregon University.

The same vocalization shows up in the African wildcat (Felis lybica), the domestic cat's closest living relative that has been around far longer than our living room tigers — meaning cats were yowling at rivals long before they ever curled up on a human's couch, he told Live Science in an email.

Territorial vocalization of this kind is common across the animal kingdom, from a chickadee's warning whistle to a howler monkey's booming roar, Schwartz said. Establishing and defending territory is tied to food, safety and mating opportunities, so animals evolved loud, unmistakable signals to defend it without resorting to physical fights every time.

A yowling cat squaring off with a neighborhood rival, in other words, is running a very old evolutionary script.

Fear, conflict and distress

Beyond territory, cats may yowl when they're frightened, cornered or trying to make another animal, or person, back off.

"If someone approaches a cat that's yowling, I would think that cat is saying, 'Please don't come any closer,'" said Katherine Anderson, a board-certified veterinary behaviorist at the Cornell Duffield Institute for Animal Behavior at Cornell University.

The same vocalization can happen during stressful situations, such as a trip to the veterinarian, when a cat is restrained, or during conflicts with other cats. Female cats in heat may also produce loud yowls, as can males competing for mates, Anderson told Live Science.

While humans often interpret these cries as a cat "screaming," de Mouzon said they're best understood as expressions of intense emotional distress. Sometimes the vocalization is directed at another individual, while other times it's simply an outward expression of the cat's emotional state — not necessarily a conscious plea for help.

Cats have learned that humans listen

Not all loud vocalizations are classic yowls, however. Cats have an impressive repertoire of sounds, and many of the noises owners hear every day are part of a unique form of communication that developed alongside humans.

Adult cats rarely meow to one another in natural settings. Instead, meowing is mostly reserved for kittens communicating with their mothers. Domestic cats appear to have retained this juvenile behavior into adulthood and redirected it toward people, de Mouzon said.

Schwartz noted that African wildcats also meow, but in a harsher, more yowl-like way than domestic cats do, and typically during conflict with other cats. One hypothesis for why the domestic cat's meow softened over generations is that it happened to share acoustic similarities with a human infant's cry, making nearby humans instinctively more responsive to it.

"They learn that meowing is useful for communicating with humans because it gets our attention," de Mouzon said.

Anderson agrees that cats have become remarkably skilled at shaping human behavior. "I think they learn our behavior faster than we learn theirs," she said. "They can train us much easier than we can train them."

That learning goes both ways. If a cat cries at 5 a.m. and its owner immediately fills the food bowl, the cat quickly learns that vocalizing produces results. Over time, the behavior may become more frequent — not because the cat is trying to be annoying, but because it has learned that the strategy works.

Why "yowl" is such a slippery word

Part of the confusion around yowling may come down to how humans classify sounds in the first place. In a 2025 study published in the journal Animal Behaviour, Schwartz's lab had participants listen to audio clips of cat vocalizations pulled from online sources and sort them into categories like meows, chirps and yowls.

Some categories were easy to define — clips people labeled "chirps," for instance, were consistently short and high-pitched. Yowls were a different story. The clips people called yowls varied wildly in pitch and length, and listeners agreed with each other less on what counted as a yowl than on almost any other vocalization type.

Schwartz suspects that's because people aren't classifying yowls by acoustic features at all — they're classifying them by the emotion they perceive. If a sound comes across as distressed or upset, listeners are likely to call it a yowl, regardless of its pitch or duration. It's similar to how a person might describe someone as having "yelled" versus "shouted" based on the emotional tone they picked up on.

That fuzziness may explain why familiarity with an individual cat matters so much. A 2015 study found that owners were fairly accurate at identifying the context behind their own cat's vocalizations but far less accurate when listening to a cat they didn't know.

When yowling could signal a health problem

Although vocalization is often perfectly normal, a sudden increase in loud crying, especially in an older cat, can sometimes point to an underlying medical condition.

Two of the most common concerns veterinarians consider are hyperthyroidism, which causes excessive thyroid hormone production, and cognitive dysfunction syndrome, a form of age-related cognitive decline similar to dementia in humans. Both conditions commonly cause nighttime vocalization.

Age is one of the first things Anderson considers when owners report excessive yowling. Cats may also vocalize because they're anxious, experiencing separation-related distress or in pain.

Rather than focusing on the sound alone, veterinarians recommend looking at the whole picture, such as when the vocalization is happening, and changes to the cat's routine.

They're not trying to spite you

One of the biggest misconceptions Anderson encounters is the idea that cats vocalize or engage in other unwanted behaviors to punish their owners.

"I don't think I've ever had a case where I'm like, 'Yep, that was spite,'" she said.

Instead, behaviors that frustrate owners usually have simpler explanations. A cat that cries constantly may have learned that vocalizing earns food or attention. Another may be fearful, anxious or experiencing an illness that isn't immediately obvious.

Cats may not communicate the way humans do, but they're almost always communicating something. The challenge isn't getting them to speak, it's learning how to interpret what they're already saying.

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

A dog-sized carnivore and mammal ancestor that lived around 236 million years ago seems to have given birth to live young, a new study suggests. This means the tactic of keeping young developing inside the mother ‪—‬ known as viviparity ‪—‬ may have emerged in the mammalian lineage 90 million to 95 million years earlier than scientists previously thought, researchers noted in the study.

"This is the first time that we have evidence on how these mammalian ancestors reproduced," said first author Leandro Gaetano, a paleontologist at Argentina's National Scientific and Technical Research Council. His team reported the findings Aug. 13 in the journal Frontiers in Mammal Science.

Mammals, along with their extinct ancestors and close relatives, belong to the Cynodontia clade, which first appeared about 260 million years ago, in the Late Permian period. But after the Great Dying extinction event 252 million years ago, which heralded the start of the Triassic, the cynodonts flourished.

Gaetano and his colleagues spotted a curious growth mark in a fossilized bone of Chiniquodon theotonicusis, a carnivorous, dog-sized cynodont that lived some 236 million years ago in what is now northwestern Argentina.

Data from living species suggested the mark was a growth ring of disorganized bone material known as neonatal line, which forms when growth rapidly accelerates just after birth or hatching. These marks are common in the bones of living terrestrial animals, Gaetano said.

"When you are in an egg or in your mom's belly, you have a small space and you grow very slowly," he told Live Science. "When you hatch or are born, you have a lot of space and you start growing very, very quickly."

To try to discern how the youngster emerged, the team measured the neonatal line and overall size of adult C. theotonicusis leg and arm bones to estimate that the individual weighed about 26 pounds (12 kilograms) when it died and about 3.7 pounds (1.7 kg) when it was born ‪—‬ about 14% of its adult mass.

Then, the team compared these values to those of 1,869 mammal species, 2,619 nonavian reptiles and 782 birds alive today. Zooming in on those of comparable weight, the team found that the reptiles ‪—‬ including snakes, turtles and crocodilians ‪—‬ that weigh between 17.6 and 32 pounds (8 to 14.5 kg) a produce hatchlings that are just 0.1% to 0.6% of their adult mass.

Birds that weigh between 17.6 and 47 pounds (8 to 21.5 kg) as adults, like some cranes or vultures, produce hatchlings of about 1.3% to 4.5% of their adult mass.

But in mammals that weigh 17.6 to 33 pounds (8 to 15 kg) as adults, some babies can hit around 20% of their adult mass, much closer to the figure for C. theotonicusis. The bay duiker antelope (Cephalophus dorsalis), for example, ‪gives birth to young that weigh about as much as the newborn C. theotonicus. This similarity in the relationship between newborn and adult mass suggests that like these antelope, C. theotonicus gave birth to living young, said Gaetano.

"It's not the smoking gun, but it does suggest they are giving birth to live young," said Emily Rayfield, a paleobiologist at the University of Bristol in the U.K. who wasn't involved in the study.

How is giving birth to live young helpful?

Giving birth to live young may have been advantageous at the time. "The Triassic was a very difficult time to be alive," Gaetano said. It was after a huge extinction event, and as ecosystems restructured and animals filled empty niches, there was huge competition for resources and strong predation pressure amid very arid conditions, so embryos of viviparous species may have been better protected than those of egg-laying species, he noted.

An egg can't move away from a predator, but a young animal can, which is a "huge advantage," said Anne Weil, a vertebrate paleontologist at Oklahoma State University who wasn't involved in the study.

She told Live Science that she wasn't surprised to see viviparity in C. theotonicus, given the range of reproductive behavior in living vertebrates. For example, there are both egg-laying and live-bearing fish and reptiles living today. There are also nonplacental mammals that lay eggs, like the duck-billed platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) and the echidna (Tachyglossidae); others, like kangaroos, produce extremely small newborns and then harbor them in belly pouches.

Until a few years ago, birthing live young was often considered a relatively modern evolutionary acquisition within the mammalian lineage, developing from egg-laying, perhaps via the intermediate step of the reproductive tactics still used by mammals with pouches. However, evidence has mounted against this in recent years and C. theotonicus lived and seemed to have given birth to live young before the ancestors of marsupials even split from the ancestors of placental mammals.

"This could be evidence of a general switch from laying eggs to giving birth to live young early in the mammalian lineage, but we need more evidence," Gaetano said.

Rayfield agreed that more research is needed to make firm conclusions. "My take on it is that live birth appeared earlier than we thought, but we still need a lot more evidence to really nail it," she told Live Science.

According to Gaetano, the bigger picture is that many characteristics that are thought to be particular features of mammals are, in fact, older. "We usually think of mammalian ancestors as small, reptile-looking creatures," he said. "But we are finding a lot of different pieces of evidence that are pointing to these guys being more similar to present-day mammals than we thought."

Aside from the newfound hint of live bearing, these include suggestions of whiskers in Probainognathus, a carnivorous cynodont that lived about 230 million years ago; and indications of hair and lactation in Prozostrodontia, another cynodont that lived about 240 million years ago.

Octopuses are known to smack fish when they get too close. But while it might seem unsporting for an animal with eight arms to start a boxing match with an animal that has none, new research shows that octopuses don't just lash out indiscriminately; instead, they slap certain fish species that "jab" and "swipe" at the octopuses in a squabble over territory.

These marine fight clubs show that octopuses' aggressive behavior is part of a more complicated set of responses than previously thought, the scientists said in the new study.

The researchers observed 101 interactions between juvenile Brazilian reef octopuses (Octopus insularis) and 10 species of reef fish in shallow waters along the northeastern coast of Brazil and on oceanic islands. The encounters revealed that the young octopuses didn't respond to every fish in the same way. Territorial fish that appeared to defend their territory from the octopuses triggered rapid, defensive reactions, including the "slap" arm movement.

But nonterritorial fish that followed the octopuses as they hunted tended to produce longer, less-confrontational encounters in which the octopuses simply continued foraging.

The findings, published July 31 in the journal Behavioural Processes, add to decades of observations of interactions between octopuses and fish by showing how juvenile O. insularis adjust their actions depending on the behavior of the fish they encounter.

"Clearly there's not one way at which they're interacting," said study co-author Jennifer Mather, a recently retired octopus behavior researcher at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta. "The territorial fish are really going to do one thing, and the nonterritorial fish are doing other things," she told Live Science.

Different fish, different response

The researchers recorded 38 juvenile octopuses interacting with fish, splitting the encounters into those involving territorial species, like damselfish (family Pomacentridae) and nonterritorial species, like blue tang (Acanthurus coeruleus).

The difference was striking. Interactions with territorial fish lasted an average of about 14 seconds and tended to involve rapid changes in behavior. The fish performed "jabs" and "swipes" as they tried to attack the octopuses, while the octopuses responded with "flinches" and arm "slaps."

Interactions with nonterritorial fish lasted much longer, averaging about 46 seconds. These fish were more likely to follow or circle the octopus while the octopus continued hunting.

The researchers used a statistical technique called lag-sequence analysis to determine whether particular behaviors tended to follow one another in predictable sequences. The analysis confirmed distinct behavioral patterns for the two types of encounters. In other words, a territorial fish trying to drive an octopus away would trigger a very different behavior than a fish that merely trailed the octopus.

"Fish territoriality significantly affected the behavior of both fishes and octopuses," the researchers wrote in the study. "These interactions are adaptive and highly context-dependent."

A slap is just one part of the story

The arm-slap behavior itself isn't new to science. Researchers have described octopuses striking or swiping at fish in previous observations. But the new study provides a more systematic look at when the behavior occurs and what happens around it.

To capture the footage, the research team snorkeled in shallow water and filmed juvenile octopuses without disturbing their normal behavior.

The clear water at their study sites sometimes offered visibility of around 66 feet (20 meters), giving the researchers a broad view of the underwater environment.

The team's analysis of the footage revealed that individual octopuses appeared to have different personalities. Some were noticeably shy, while others were more reactive during interactions. The researchers don't yet know whether those traits differ by sex or age or whether the behavioral traits remain consistent over time.

The octopuses were also curious about their observers.

"During our field sessions, the octopuses frequently showed interest in our cameras, reaching out to touch them," said study co-authors Michaella Pereira Andrade, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences in the United Kingdom, and Charles Morphy Santos, an associate professor of evolutionary biology at the Federal University of ABC in Brazil. "In fact, one octopus even managed to steal our diving weight and carry it straight into its den," they told Live Science in an email.

The footage also showed that the octopuses reacted to different fish in other ways.

"One key finding that stood out in this study was that, when observing the octopuses and fish, it was clear that the octopuses would sometimes split their skin patterns into two distinct colorations," Andrade and Morphy Santos said.

The researchers called this pattern "half-blotch." The distinctive pattern appeared during interactions with territorial fish, when the fish approached or attacked the octopuses. The octopuses displayed circular white spots on the sides of their bodies facing the fish. Observing the interaction, the researchers noticed that the fish appeared to back away after the octopuses displayed the body pattern.

"We hypothesized it might serve as a form of warning communication," Andrade and Morphy Santos said.

The researchers don't yet know exactly what the fish see when they look at the octopuses' changing skin, or whether the pattern is deliberately produced as a signal.

The findings can help people understand octopuses' behaviors when they encounter the animals in the wild, the team added.

"One of the interesting things about when we do this is, people can read [this study], go snorkel, and have a guide to what they're seeing, which I think is really important," Mather said.

How much do you know about octopuses? Find out with our octopus quiz!

Despite historical portrayals, the dodo was a relatively intelligent bird that might have spent much of its life in the dark, new research suggests.

Dodos were traditionally portrayed as dumb, bumbling birds. But now, scientists have scanned dodo skulls and found nothing to suggest these birds were stupid. What they did find, however, was that the part of the dodo's brain that's responsible for visual processing was small ‪—‬ comparable to that of some nocturnal birds.

"Our interpretation is that this species was really, really not relying much on sight," study first author Sara Citron, a doctoral candidate in behavior and evolution at the University of Lethbridge in Canada, told Live Science. "And the only situation where you're not relying on sight is when there is no light available."

Dodos were wiped out within a century of humans settling on their island home of Mauritius in 1598. However, it wasn't just hunting that drove them to extinction. The sailors introduced dogs, cats, pigs and rats, which would have likely killed the birds and eaten their eggs. These invasive species wreaked havoc on the dodo's ecosystem and continue to plague Mauritian wildlife to this day.

In the new study, published Aug. 5 in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, researchers found that dodo brains scaled with their body size as would be expected for their group, which is made up of pigeons and doves. In other words, their brains weren't especially small for their size, with no evidence of inferior intelligence compared to their relatives.

This isn't the first time researchers have poured cold water on the stereotypical depiction of dodos. A 2024 study found that dodos were likely fast and powerful, rather than slow and bumbling. The new research also builds on a 2016 study that concluded dodos were likely as smart as modern pigeons, which can solve problems and understand abstract concepts like space and time.

The dumb-dodo myth likely stems from accounts that these birds had no fear of humans and tended to run toward trouble. Sailors figured out that if a dodo was in distress, other dodos would run toward their calls, which meant the sailors could catch even more of the birds.

"Apparently, they would just grab one, let it scream and wait, and all the other dodos would run towards this one to see what was the cause of the distress," Citron said.

This might seem like an incredibly stupid survival strategy, but it's not a failure of dodo evolution. Dodos, like many isolated island animals, evolved in an ecosystem that didn't have any mammalian predators, so they were not equipped to deal with humans or the other animals they brought.

Inside the dodo's brain

To better understand dodo biology, the researchers embarked on an international collaborative effort to study as many CT (computed tomography) scans of dodo heads as they could to deduce the size and shape of their brains, starting with one at the University of Lethbridge.

"As soon as we started looking into it, we realized that the optic lobe, which is the part of the brain that processes visual information in birds, was extremely reduced," Citron said. "And that's typically a very good indication of something completely different in the behavior of a species."

The team compared the dodo scans to those collected on 36 living species of pigeons and doves, as well as the extinct Rodrigues solitaire (Pezophaps solitaria), a close relative of the dodo that lived on Rodrigues Island — east of the Mauritius mainland — and suffered the same fate. Unlike dodos, the solitaire's brain was what researchers would expect from a giant pigeon.

The researchers concluded that the difference in visual processing abilities seen in dodos, along with an enhanced sense of smell, might be evidence for the bird being crepuscular — active during twilight — or nocturnal. There weren't any historical accounts of the dodo being active in the dark, Citron said, but that wasn't surprising. Other than the accounts of sailors using dodo cries as bait, researchers don't have any reliable records of the bird's behavior.

"The most absurd thing is that the dodo is this famous bird," Citron said. "Everyone knows what a dodo is, what it looks like. However, we don't know absolutely anything of its behavior or its ecological niche. If you look at the historical accounts, we have more information about how it tasted."

For now, interpretations of the dodo's behavior remain speculative. However, Citron said she wishes the dodo would stop being portrayed as a "stupid thing that is doomed to go extinct because of how inept it is." She argued that animals on the brink of extinction today, especially when they're not like humans, are also dismissed for the same reason.

"[Endangered animals] are intelligent, they are adapted to their environment for millions of years, and the fact that we are destroying it now doesn't mean that they are stupid or they don't deserve to keep living," she added.

A wild widow spider behavior involving a backflip into death during sex has a simple genetic explanation, new research finds.

Male redback spiders (Latrodectus hasselti) — Australia's version of black widows — flip into females' fangs while mating in order to make sex last longer. They also constrict their abdomens — a maneuver that seems to help them survive the experience of being eaten alive long enough to finish transferring their sperm. Then, they break off their sperm-transferring organs, known as pedipalps, into the females like a cork on a bottle, which prevents other males from inseminating them.

Intriguingly, a close New Zealand cousin of the redback, the katipō (Latrodectus katipo), doesn't do any of this. ‪There are no backflips and no cannibalism — just a respectful courtship dance and a polite parting of ways afterward. That difference offered researchers an opportunity to understand the genetics of the more gymnastic mating behavior.

"What makes this system so intriguing is the fact that we are dealing with two species here, which are very closely related," Kardelen Özgün Uludağ, a doctoral student of behavioral biology at the University of Hamburg in Germany, told Live Science in an email. These two species may have separated less than 100,000 years ago, but they still show entirely different behavior and observable traits. "This is very uncommon in animals," she said.

To figure out the genetic basis of this behavioral schism, Uludağ and her colleagues first exposed katipō females to redback males so that they would mate. The two are closely related enough to yield hybrid offspring. The researchers then crossbred hybrid females with either male redbacks or male katipō spiders. This led to mixed-genetic males. (The researchers couldn't mate katipō males with redback females in the first place because redback females will eat katipōs instead of mating with them.)

The researchers took these hybrid males and paired them with katipō females so they could watch their mating behavior without any of them getting eaten. Then, they tracked how often the hybrid males backflipped and/or constricted their abdomens at the (presumably baffled) noncannibalistic females.

To their surprise, the researchers found that the behaviors did not have close genetic links. Hybrid males combined backflips and life-extending abdominal constrictions only about half the time, otherwise doing just one or the other. The researchers also saw patterns of inheritance that suggested that the somersaulting was linked to the spiders' sex chromosome — the X chromosome. Male and female spiders both have two X chromosomes, but females' X chromosomes carry two full sets of chromosomes, while males' carry only one. What's more, the somersaulting behavior had a surprisingly simple dominant-recessive pattern of being passed to offspring.

The abdominal constriction, on the other hand, was a more complex genetic trait, the researchers reported Wednesday (Aug. 12) in the journal Biology Letters. That behavior may be controlled by multiple genes or strongly influenced by female behavior, the researchers concluded.

Although widow spiders are famed for eating their mates, only a couple of black widow species really do. The Australian redback is one, and the U.S.-based Southern black widow (Latrodectus mactans) is another.

The researchers would like to get to the bottom of what drives this behavior. "It would be nice to investigate more species of the genus Latrodectus to allow comparative studies," Uludağ said.

What do you know about spiders? Test your smarts with our spider quiz!

Sperm whales make the loudest communication sound of any animal on Earth, researchers find — but they aren't sure why.

In a new study, researchers investigated the mysterious, low-frequency clangs made by male sperm whales and found that they were louder than any known sperm whale communication signal, with the potential to be heard by other whales around 43 miles (70 kilometers) away.

They are very loud and metallic sounds that almost sound "like a jail door slamming," which is "why they are also called clangs," study first author Simone Videsen and co-author Peter Teglberg Madsen, biologists at the Center for Active Sensing with Sound at Aarhus University in Denmark, told Live Science in an email. "You feel small as a human when you hear them, as they are clearly made by something bigger than you," they said.

Sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) are the largest toothed predators, growing up to around 59 feet (18 meters) long. They dive deep into the ocean to hunt giant squid (Architeuthis dux) and other prey that dwell as low as 1.9 miles (3 km) below the ocean surface.

The distinctive clangs, first reported in the 1980s, are the loudest communication signal that sperm whales make, although they can produce even louder echolocation clicks to locate prey during hunts. The clangs are unusual because they are made only by males and represent an extreme form of communication that scientists still can't fully explain.

In the latest study, the researchers used hydrophones (underwater microphones) off the Seychelles to measure the sound level of the clangs. They also studied the rhythm of the signals in recordings collected in other locations, including off Sri Lanka, Norway and Scotland.

The recordings revealed that the whales kept up a slow, low-frequency rhythm, unlike the short, rhythmic clicks that both males and females make for typical social communication or the clicks used in echolocation. In fact, the rhythm was so slow that males left a gap of 5 to 10 seconds between each clang. That might not sound that impressive ‪—‬ but as far as we know, whales can't count to 10, so they are using another means to keep up this rhythm. According to the study, the whales might be relying on the echoes of the clangs bouncing off the seafloor.

Sperm whales can produce these record-breaking acoustics thanks to their ginormous noses — the largest of any animal — that dominate their massive heads, which make up about one-third of their body length. To make the clangs, male whales use their "phonic lips" ‪—‬ structures in their noses that snap together.

"They make [these noises] by forcing pressurized air through so-called phonic lips in their giant sound producing nose," Videsen and Madsen said.

The researchers proposed a few possible explanations for why the whales might be making the long-range clangs. For example, the males might be using the sounds to attract mates or scare off other males.

However, the communication may exist for another, unknown reason. In future studies, the researchers hope to learn more about this mysterious form of communication by playing recordings of the clangs underwater and seeing how nearby sperm whales respond.

Throughout his career as a composer, Jim Nollman has worked with unorthodox partners to create music. Instead of collaborating solely with human musicians, the artist has expanded his cast to include animal bandmates, and they've been making melodies together for more than 50 years.

Nollman's new album, "Orcas' Greatest Hits," will be released Aug. 14 by the music label Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. As the title suggests, the album is a collection of songs centered around orca (Orcinus orca) vocalizations.

Nollman now lives in Friday Harbor, Washington, but he recorded these sounds off the coast of British Columbia between 1985 and 2002, using underwater microphones called hydrophones. The vocalizations weren't random calls that Nollman overheard; rather, he prompted the orcas to "sing" by broadcasting his and fellow musicians' music into the water via underwater speakers. The artists kept the volume at a reasonable level to protect the orcas and performed after dark to avoid motorboat sounds.

However, orcas weren't Nollman's first animal bandmates. Fresh out of Tufts University in the 1970s, he made music with various animals, including turkeys, wolves and dolphins. To learn more, we spoke with Nollman about his career, including several years he spent consulting with the U.S. Navy, and the extraordinary interactions he's had with whales and other creatures.

Sascha Pare: How did you first start making music with animals?

Jim Nollman: In my latter year at university, I got involved in the theater, doing all the music for all their plays. I soon got into John Cage [an American composer known for his innovative approaches to sound] ‪—‬ first in Boston, and then in the San Francisco Bay Area when I moved there. I got to know some of the avant-garde music people, especially in Berkeley, because there was a big movement there [centered around California's KPFA Radio].

I'd been in Mexico, playing flute, and the turkeys next door would always gobble on a certain high note and at a certain volume. I said [to an editor at KPFA], "Why don't you send me to a turkey farm? I'd like to do a Thanksgiving Day piece." He gave me a sound man and a Nagra tape recorder. I remember vividly, because having a Nagra after just getting out of college was a big deal for me. I was into technology. [Editor's note: Nagra is a Swiss brand of portable audio recorders.]

The turkey farm had 300 turkeys, and I immediately learned from the owner that it's really only the males that gobble. He kept the males and the females separate, so he put me into the fenced-in area where the males were. I started singing, and I could control them. The turkeys closest to me would start, and the gobble would go out to the edge of the 300 birds. And then it would come back, and then they would all stop. I was singing "Froggie Went A-Courtin'," which is an old American folk song [originally from Scotland] about animals. I sang 30 or 40 verses of this song and controlled the turkeys.

I was around 24 years old, and I had a hit. I knew I wanted to be a musician, but I had some major flaws to be a performer, because I didn't like being the center of attention. I'm kind of an introvert. That's a loser if you're trying to be a singer-songwriter. I loved writing tunes and playing them, but not in front of a big audience. This [recording tunes in nature with animals] was a way to get into music.

After the turkeys, I wondered if I should try making music with animals again. I tried it with kangaroo rats [Dipodomys deserti], which build these burrows like Trinidad steel drums. Kangaroo rats only come out at night, and they thump to each other in their burrow systems, which are tuned — it seemed to me, anyway, that each place in the burrow had a different tone — and they communicate with one another.

Then, I went to a wolf preserve. I realized that the wolves did two or three howl sessions in the morning around dawn and two or three at night. The wolves wouldn't play with me if I was out of their key. If I played a flat note, they would stop and basically tell me, "We don't mind if you're playing in our pack, but you've got to do it right." That was a big lesson for me, and that's how I got into it.

SP: Your new album features orcas. Did you always have a sweet spot for orcas, or is there another animal you preferred working with?

JN: No, I don't have a sweet spot for orcas. I recorded orcas for 15 years, and I had lots of recordings, most of which I never really listened to, because I didn't know what to do with them. At some point, I decided that "I can't do anything more with the orcas, and I don't like going to whale conferences and being this authority," because it wasn't about that for me.

[After years of recording orcas], I started going to the Arctic ‪—‬ because I wanted to go to the Arctic and because beluga whales [Delphinapterus leucas] were there, and they seemed like the opposites of orcas. The orcas were very much in tight families traveling together and making very simple calls that had deep meaning. To have their echolocation against a speaker at midnight could be like being in a war zone. It was so loud; we had speakers blow out sometimes.

The beluga whales were the antithesis of that. It seemed like they all were talking at the same time, and they all seemed to know what everybody else was saying. This is my speculation. They used sound as their family anchor, and I had no idea if they all understood each other talking. But it was very much more animated than what the orcas were doing. I would say 50% of the orca calls were just two notes; they were D to C, and back to D. And they would do that all day long, some of them. Beluga whales sometimes sounded like belly laughs. They made the weirdest sounds, and I loved it.

I went everywhere in the Arctic. I started out in the first year going to Nome [Alaska] in the Bering Strait, and then I went east to the Mackenzie River delta in northern Canada on the Beaufort Sea. Then, I went to Baffin Island in the Canadian High Arctic. In every place I went, limited beluga populations were crashing. At some point, I realized this was a complete loser. I pretty much gave it up until I met some people from Finland who said, "You should try it in Russia." The Soviet Union had recently crashed, and they were opening up all the places where they had their gulags [forced labor camps] and their nuclear fleet. The Solovetsky Islands were loaded with beluga whales that hadn't seen people in 70 years. I went there, and I had a great time with the beluga whales.

SP: What is your favorite memory of working with orcas or beluga whales?

JN: Six or eight years ago, somebody brought me and a bunch of other artists up to Hudson Bay [in Canada], basically to emulate what I'd done for so many years [artistic residencies to experiment with whale sounds]. I was the mentor for everybody. I liked that role. We were confronted with beluga whales, and I said, "I don't really want to play the guitar or the mandolin with the beluga whales, because I've tried that all over the Arctic and I've never had much success. I'm going to put my head in the water and blow bubbles."

The beluga whale came up, and it wrapped its mouth around my face. It did the same thing to the woman who was blowing bubbles on the other side of the kayak we were on. That was maybe the most fun thing I ever did with cetaceans. I wasn't worried at all. I've had the same thing happen with giraffes. I was in Texas at this game farm, and this giraffe came and licked my whole face with its giant tongue. It was really quite wonderful.

SP: The oldest recordings in the new album are 40 years old, and you said you hadn't listened to all of them before making the album. What was it like hearing them after all these years?

JN: I had 65 hours of tapes, and I listened to them over three or four months. Ninety percent of it was rubbish; it was just repetitive, and the whales would get into their D-to-C-to-D call routine. I wanted something where there was a groove, or some kind of magic going on that was inexplicable.

I started choosing some sequences. I thought it was only a certain level of connection that we'd created, but a couple of the things that I listened to when I was in that process blew me away. The one where I was playing James Brown riffs into the water ‪—‬ that was very strong for me. I'd never heard that before. I was discovering new stuff by giving it a close listen.

There's one where I was being filmed by National Geographic, and it was just me and a guy on a big boat cruising the waters. I started playing a country blues bottleneck on the guitar. [Editor's note: A bottleneck in country blues is a guitar-playing technique where a hard object is placed on a finger and glided along the strings.] The whales only did this a couple of times, but they would come in with a chord change. Say I'm playing in a key of D; they would come up and play the G in perfect time. I was impressed by that.

SP: Did you ever play the recordings of you and the orcas back to the orcas?

JN: No, because the recording can't answer the whales. I was trying to make a telephone connection, so it has to be two things talking to each other. To play a recording would be like me saying, "Let's stop this interview now, and I'm going to put on something of me giving an interview to somebody I spoke to yesterday." You wouldn't like that, and I don't think the whales would have liked that either if I did it to them. It had to be direct. I had many people who were very ardent or passionate about singing or reciting poetry — one guy wanted to sing Jewish death prayers to the whales. But the whales didn't come.

SP: Is part of why you've been so successful at making music with animals that they particularly like you?

JN: Some animals like me. I definitely got through to the orcas. I could tell that, because I had an interim of eight years between doing it with the big communities [of artists] and going out alone with the orcas. They were the same orcas, and they definitely knew who I was the first time I put sound in the water again. That's when that country blues episode happened. We were all much more relaxed with each other. The second time was great. It was also a tragedy, because the whales had lost their residence to the loss of salmon [in the northeast Pacific Ocean], and they were way out of their range.

SP: Your work with orcas and other whales landed you a job with the U.S. Navy in 2011. How did that happen, and what was your role?

JN: I was doing underwater concerts in the 1990s. I was invited to Kodiak Island, which is a large island off the coast of southern Alaska. They wanted me to do an underwater concert. At the time of this festival, in which I was performing, the U.S. Navy was sending ballistic missiles from Southern California to the waters off Kodiak Island for testing. This was destroying the halibut [Hippoglossus stenolepis] fishery on Kodiak Island, because the fishermen couldn't go into this area, suddenly.

The Navy sent a guy who was part of this ballistic missile thing but also had a PR background. He said, "Can I speak before your concert?" I said, "You can speak about whatever you want, but you've got to get in the water. That's the payment you have to give me: Get in the water and hear all this music that I've created."

He was blown away. I had a fan. He took me out for dinner and asked me if I had any ideas about solving this great scandal that was enveloping the Navy at the time, which was the killing of mostly beaked whales during mid-frequency sonar exercises, mostly in the Bahamas, in this hole in the ocean that's there. Nobody had a solution, so he wanted me to be on the team. I said, "Sure, I'll be on the team." It was like somebody asking me to play for the New York Yankees or something — completely odd, but I thought, "OK, I'll try that."

He called me back two years later, saying, "We have our money, and we want you to come to the Groton submarine base [in Connecticut], where we'll have our first meeting with submarine captains, Ph.D. sonar engineers and a few whale biologists." That went on for seven years. I took the job seriously. I told them that I thought we could solve it in five minutes. I said, "All you need to do is take care. If you see whales in the vicinity, don't exercise on that day." This sounds so totally obvious, but the fact was that he [the PR man] was contending with a Navy establishment that believed that the Navy could do anything to save the American people from being bombed or wrecked. They didn't see whales as anything but collateral damage.

SP: Do you have a favorite song on the new album?

JN: I like "The Three Jimmies." I never knew that James Brown's guitar player was named Jimmy Nolen — I mean, that's really outrageous. So, it's the three Jimmies, right? I really like the music, and I like the piano player [Jonathan Churcher], who plays one note every three or four bars. The response of the whales is also brilliant, I think. There's one part where the whale starts to echolocate, which is the way they see the world; it's their perceptional tool. The whale starts clicking in time with the beat that I'm playing on the guitar. That only happened once in 65 hours of recordings, and I thought that was pretty unusual.

SP: What's next for you after "Orcas' Greatest Hits"?

JN: I'm composing new music, and I'm hoping I'm at least breaking even [with the new album] so that they [Smithsonian Folkways Recordings] can do the next one, which is called the "Cowbird Variations." The cowbirds are basically the bottom voice, maybe the part that's played by bass in pop music. Everything else is other birds and insects called treehoppers. It has this very primitive sound to it.

I love doing this music with cowbirds, because cowbirds have a horrible reputation. They lay their eggs in other birds' nests, and when the eggs hatch, the baby cowbirds knock all the birds in the nest out and kill them. Then, the parents — juncos, where I live — end up raising the cowbirds. These birds have a terrible reputation, but they make one of the strangest sounds in nature — so that's why I chose them.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

An ichthyosaur fossil found in Australia's outback may preserve a rare snapshot of a prehistoric food chain. Around 100 million years ago, the enormous marine reptile swallowed a flying pterosaur before being attacked by a giant ocean predator, new research suggests.

The fossil set, nicknamed "BOB" or "Bag of Bones," belonged to a 20- to 23-foot-long (6 to 7 meters) ichthyosaur, an animal that belonged to a group of dolphin-shaped marine reptiles that lived alongside the dinosaurs during the Mesozoic era, from about 250 million to 90 million years ago. But in a new study, researchers discovered fragments of a pterosaur's jaw — along with fish and cephalopod remains — preserved inside the animal's body cavity.

The finding is the first confirmed evidence that ichthyosaurs ate pterosaurs, an extinct group of flying reptiles that ruled the ancient skies, according to the new study, published July 28 in the journal Gondwana Research.

The fossils may also hint at the ichthyosaur's violent end. Its skeleton — discovered in 2019 in Queensland's outback — contains shattered bones, missing ribs and large crushing injuries. Researchers think the gruesome wounds may have been inflicted by Kronosaurus queenslandicus, a colossal crocodile-like apex predator that lived 120 million to 100 million years ago in the ancient Eromanga Sea in Australia.

A rare prehistoric meal

Fossilized stomach contents are a rare find because they can be preserved only under very specific conditions.

"Rapid burial after death is essential to prevent decay and scattering of remains," study co-author Matt White, a research associate at the University of New England in Australia, told Live Science in an email. "The animal must have died soon after its last meal so stomach acids don't fully digest the prey."

Researchers used advanced neutron imaging to peer inside BOB's stomach contents without breaking any of the fossilized formations. The scans revealed hidden bones and helped scientists determine that the remains were likely associated with the ichthyosaur's digestive system.

White said that advances in imaging technology are making it possible to uncover evidence that would previously have remained hidden inside fossils.

"Scanning techniques have also improved, which has enabled us to see inside specimens and reveal what they potentially ate," White said. The methods can also reveal "the shape of various organs" and internal bone structures, he added.

The pterosaur remains were found near the front of the ichthyosaur's body cavity rather than in their expected position as digested prey, which White and his colleagues think may be because the ichthyosaur struck the seafloor headfirst shortly after its last meal, shifting some of its stomach contents forward.

"We believe the animal died in the water column — perhaps from a pliosaur (Kronosaurus) attack or natural causes — and then sank," White said. "It impacted the seafloor with its rostrum, and connected soft tissues kept most of the body in sequence."

Reconstructing an ancient ecosystem

The fossil offers a rare glimpse into the food web of the ancient Eromanga Sea, which covered much of central Australia during the early Cretaceous period around 145 million to 100 million years ago.

Although ichthyosaurs are known to have eaten fish and squidlike animals, evidence that they ate pterosaurs, a common predator of the ancient skies, has been elusive. The new fossil suggests that at least some ichthyosaurs may have fed on flying reptiles that landed on the water or died and floated to the surface.

"Such discoveries yield valuable information about trophic interactions and allow us to reconstruct ancient ecosystems in greater detail," White said.

A camera drone operator captured footage of a humpback whale giving birth off the north coast of New South Wales in what is thought to be a world first.

Alexander Forrest, a commercial drone pilot for the Organisation for the Rescue and Research of Cetaceans in Australia (ORRCA), was conducting aerial observations of migrating humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) on July 28. ORRCA is a nonprofit organization focused on the rescue, conservation and welfare of marine mammals.

During the survey, Forrest noticed a whale swimming slightly behind her pod and going unusually slowly. Then, he saw her give birth.

"It's incredibly rare to see a moment like this in the ocean. It's a very rarely documented encounter," Forrest told Live Science. "It's the first drone video as far as we know of a full humpback whale live birth. It gives critical inside moments in the first moments of a calf's life, and also discovers the behaviour of a new humpback whale mother and her freshly newborn calf."

An ORRCA spokesperson said that this is only the fourth time the phenomenon of a humpback whale giving birth had been filmed, in general. Scientists also have footage of other whale births, including a gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) birth filmed off the coast of California and a sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) recorded giving birth in the Caribbean.

The drone video shows the newborn whale surface from blood-reddened water for its first breath. The mother then turns back to reunite with it. The scene was filmed around 0.4 miles (700 meters) from the shore at Kingscliff in northeastern New South Wales.

The birth is "a symbol of one of the strongest conservation efforts in history, returning humpback whales from near extinction to nearly 50,000 on the New South Wales coast," Forrest said. Gathering data on this humpback whale population is critical to "discovering more about where they birth, what happens when they birth, and what those early moments look like."

The footage will now be analyzed so that a report on the observation can be peer-reviewed and published in a scientific journal. Notably, the mother whale was trailing behind her pod when she gave birth, a detail biologists will compare with observations of other birthing whales that were accompanied by members of their pod. For instance, the 2023 drone footage of the sperm whale giving birth showed that she had 10 adult females near her that formed a protective circle and took turns lifting the calf up so it could breathe at the water's surface.

Throughout their first weeks, calves stay close to their mothers and learn critical behaviors, such as breathing at the surface.

"Humpback whales seem to have an incredible maternal bond with their offspring," Forrest said. "There is an 11-month period where this calf will be raised and feeding on very nutrient-rich milk until it is a yearling and can fend for itself."

A newborn humpback whale calf weighs 1 to 1.5 tons (900 to 1,360 kilograms) and measures roughly 10 to 16 feet (3 to 5 meters) in length. While feeding on its mother's milk, the calf will gain 100 pounds (45 kg) a day and develop the strength and food storage it needs for its first migration. Humpback whales undertake one of the longest migrations of any mammal, travelling up to 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) each way between the cold waters of the poles to warm tropical breeding grounds.

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?"

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

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.