Across 53 challenging days between fall 2020 and spring 2021, a 360-pound (160 kilograms) young male grizzly bear nicknamed "Lingenpolter" tried to cross Interstate 90 in western Montana 46 times. High-resolution GPS tracking showed him moving parallel to four lanes of roaring traffic, bouncing off the highway like a furry pinball as he searched for a gap.

Eventually, Lingenpolter beat the odds, probably by slipping under a river bridge. But his hero's journey shows what a formidable barrier a busy highway can be for wildlife, Cecily Costello, a research wildlife biologist at Montana's Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, told Live Science. "It is easy to imagine the difficulty this grizzly bear experienced trying to reach the other side," Costello said.

This past May, another grizzly wasn't so lucky. Braving a crossing near one of Lingenpolter's attempts, the 27-year-old male bear was struck and killed by a truck, triggering a multicar rollover.

It's crucial for grizzly bears (Ursus arctos), also known as brown bears, to have room to roam. When they can't move between populations to mate, small groups get genetically isolated. And what's true for bears can also be true for other wildlife. "It's really challenging to be a small, fragmented population," said Michael Proctor, a wildlife biologist at Birchdale Ecological Ltd., a Canada-based environmental consulting firm. Such fragmentation is "one of the mechanisms by which we lose entire communities, and sometimes whole species," he told Live Science.

Nowhere is this challenge more urgent than in the 2,100 mile long (3,400 kilometers) region stretching along the spine of the Rocky Mountains between Yellowstone in Wyoming and the Yukon in northern Canada. The area, which spans five U.S. states, two Canadian provinces, and more than 75 Indigenous territories "represents the most intact, connected, wild, large mountain region in the world," Jordan Reeves, program director of landscape connectivity at the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y), which aims to secure connectivity throughout the region told Live Science.

But as highways, rail lines, and human development fragment its valleys, maintaining connected pathways for grizzly bears across this landscape has become a challenge.

Grizzlies range across vast, diverse terrain, spanning high-elevation alpine habitats, mid-mountain slopes, and low valley bottoms, which means safeguarding their movement can also protect passageways for coexisting species, including wolverines, mountain goats, elk and bighorn sheep, Proctor said. That's why researchers are trying to understand why, where and when grizzlies move. And what stops them in their tracks.

"We're looking at how a bear sees the world," Andrew Derocher, a bear biologist at the University of Alberta who has used GPS collars on grizzly bears to trace their movements, told Live Science.

Nature versus nurture

When Sarah Sells started her graduate studies in animal behavior, her supervisor told her to "try to crawl into their fur brains and understand how they think," Sells told Live Science. Although we can't recreate exactly what's going on between a grizzly's ears, GPS collars that track animal movement hourly can tell scientists a lot about how animals behave, said Sells, who is currently the assistant unit leader of the U.S. Geological Survey's Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit.

That tracking data is starting to produce an incredibly detailed picture not just of where bears go but also how and why they're making those choices.

"Bears are food finding machines," Chris Servheen, a bear biologist with the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Bear Specialist Group, told Live Science. "So remembering where they found food is critical to their success in life."

Using a combination of telemetry data (information collected by tracking devices) and movement modeling, Derocher and colleagues have investigated how well grizzlies remember where food is and when it is best to visit a foraging patch. Derocher's research showed that about two-thirds of the bears have a great memory for where and in what season they previously found food. His tracking data also revealed that wild bears generally avoid humans. But bears have only a few months to fatten up for winter. If food is scarce, many bears go into human environments and sometimes get killed, Proctor said.

The data is also offering insight into different bear "personalities." Bears are ultimately individuals, with their own traits and quirks, Servheen said.

Tracking data suggests that a lot of bear behavior is transmitted culturally via a mother's influence. Sometimes, the wrong behavior can get passed down to the next generation, Servheen said. For example, an infamous female grizzly known as 399 jaywalked potentially hundreds of times in the Jackson Hole valley in Wyoming while managing to keep her distance from humans. Her 20-odd cubs learned to follow her example, but they lacked her strategic caution. Several were killed by vehicles or management euthanizations.

"It's a risky thing to teach your kids to do stuff like that," Servheen said. "And her offspring weren't as smart as she was."

A cracked windshield

Further north along the region between Yellowstone and the Yukon, Proctor's first DNA survey across 1,500 square miles (4,000 square kilometers) of southern British Columbia in the late 1990s shattered his illusion that the bears, along with bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) and other species in this province, were free to roam. Instead, he found a "cracked windshield" landscape, where roads and human sprawl had fractured the wilderness into isolated genetic islands. In the 2000s, the genetic diversity of the South Selkirk grizzly bears — a detatched subpopulation inhabiting southeastern British Columbia, northern Idaho, and northeastern Washington — was so low, for example, that biologists feared the bears wouldn't survive.

But Proctor and his colleagues went on to use bear movement data to model pathways through human-settled valleys. Proctor was so convinced about the viability of one potential corridor that he paid 10,000 Canadian dollars ($7,000) of his own money to buy a key piece of land right in the middle of it. "That was the first canoe over the waterfall of purchasing connectivity land," Proctor said

Proctor’s land secured a segment of a crucial connectivity corridor and, in the following years, he and other scientists partnered with trusts to purchase other land parcels, build fences, and establish safe corridors for grizzlies in the Creston Valley in southeastern British Columbia. These actions helped bears move north and south (sometimes across the border) and between the South Selkirk Mountains and Purcell Mountains. The researchers then watched bears like "Captain Hook," who'd been shot in the leg, hobble into the South Selkirks and breed with eight females. By 2021, nine immigrant bears had produced 27 new offspring within the population.

"This is gene flow; this is connectivity," Proctor said. "We took a completely isolated population and pretty much recovered it."

Despite efforts to safeguard corridors through human occupied landscape, roads continue to stop bears in their tracks. When Servheen tracked bears near Highway 2 in northwest Montana, he found that many of the grizzlies avoided the highway altogether and those that crossed did so at night. But he also found that the bears' crossings clustered in specific sections of the road. Finding the crossing zones has helped researchers identify good locations for constructing overpasses and underpasses on many busy highways, but a crossing structure on its own is not enough, Servheen cautioned.

A bear's memory for where to find food is exemplary, but there's no special reward in a bear's brain for crossing a road safely — only a fatal penalty when they don't, Servheen said. So conservationists can't rely on bears to remember where crossings are. Instead, they must build fencing along the highway to funnel wildlife into the underpasses or overpasses. Then, the immediate land on each side needs to allow animals safe passage. "Otherwise, you have a bridge to nowhere," Servheen said.

Now researchers such as Sells are trying to use data about bears' likeliest routes to determine potential corridors in locations where they have little tracking data or where few bears live yet.

To do this, Sells is developing a virtual "Sims for Bears" that recreates the Continental Divide Ecosystem in Montana. In the life-simulation video game "The Sims," players give virtual humans personality traits, preferences and needs, and then drop them into a virtual environment to see how they behave.

Sells built the model using the GPS collaring data from 65 grizzly bears navigating individual paths through greenery, riparian areas and around forests and roads. Then, she "parachutes" an individual digital bear into a detailed computer simulation of real-world terrain and has them take thousands of virtual steps. By running these multiple simulated bears through thousands of iterations across the digital terrain, the researchers can watch where the virtual bears repeatedly choose to walk, effectively creating a map of predicted movement corridors.

Sells has used the model to predict how grizzly bears might recolonize the Bitterroot ecosystem of Idaho and Montana, which Lingenpolter was heading toward when attempting to cross Interstate 90.

To get to the Bitterroot Mountains, bears must pass through a valley filled with people, roads, garbage and fruit trees. "So knowing where they are more likely to end up is helpful to address things that could be difficult for humans or bears," Sells told Live Science.

The people problem

The data is also confirming that the greatest barrier bears face comes from human contact or transportation infrastructure across the entire Yellowstone-to-Yukon region. Studies from across west-central North America report that humans directly or indirectly caused between 77% and 90% of grizzly bear deaths from 1989 to 2015. Hunting, managed kills in urban areas and road and rail collisions all take a toll.

Bears in the wild usually avoid people, but some bears seek out human-dominated areas because they know these places are a source of food. People move to the Elk Valley in southeastern British Columbia because they love nature, but then they plant apple trees in their backyard, which attract bears, said Clayton Lamb, a wildlife scientist at the nonprofit Biodiversity Pathways.

Quickly, a bear eating backyard apples gets labeled a "problem bear," "when really it is a 'people problem,'" Lamb told Live Science.

Even human recreation takes a toll on bears' health and ability to move freely. Lamb's research has shown that grizzly bears try to avoid areas next to busy cycling and hiking trails.

To minimize human-bear conflict, Michelle McLellan, a wildlife ecologist at Biodiversity Pathways, has tracked trail use by both people and grizzlies in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia. McLellan documented people's habits using trail cameras and apps such as Strava Metro. Her research shows that the bears use the trails to move quickly between foraging spots but have learned not to use the trails that are most popular with humans. Consequently, the Nelson Cycling Club decided to close certain trails in the spring and cautioned riders about when and how to use the open trails. "Ride aware, make noise, slow down when needed," the club cautioned in its May newsletter.

Working with information from McLellan, the club has cut back overgrown vegetation along sight lines to prevent mountain bikers from startling bears at close range. They've also constructed wooden platforms on sections of trails that clatter and rumble as bikes pass over them, giving bears early notice of approaching riders. "The key is to not surprise them by making a lot of noise." McLellan told Live Science, noting that grizzlies are more likely to attack if they are surprised.

One advantage of having human mountain biking and hiking trails concentrated close to towns is that it focuses recreation into specific areas, Lamb said. Keeping trails condensed supplies multiple accessible paths and reduces humans encroaching on true wilderness — prime bear habitat. "The goal would be to ensure that there's sufficient recreation opportunities for people to stay healthy and connected to their local landscape while ensuring that wildlife can still move around and access their habitats," Lamb said

Learning to share

As humans increasingly live, work and play in bear territory, it's important to recognize the impact on the animals, Servheen said. "The bears never get a day off," he said. "Every day, they're trying to stay away from people and make a living in a place with multiple people on the landscape."

Bears expend a lot of much-needed energy trying to avoid people, and they won't be able to do that forever, Servheen said. As humans increase the development of private lands and recreation in bear territory, the squeeze is on. "There's going to be more conflicts with bears, and more dead bears," Servheen said.

The bears have done their part, Lamb said. His research has shown that bears living near humans are adapting by becoming mostly nocturnal, which reduces their odds of clashing with humans. "So, we need to meet them where they are at and see what we can do to share the space," Lamb said.

On the human side, people need to make it less tempting for bears to be in human dominated areas, McLellan said. That means keeping garbage stowed and making sure there is no ripe fruit available. "If you live rurally, you want them to be able to pass through your property but not linger near your home or in your front yard," McLellan said.

Bears have proved to be adaptable and persistent; Lingenpolter tried to cross the highway dozens of times before finding a way under. However, Servheen warned that we are putting them in a tough spot. To keep bear populations stable, scientists need data on bear behavior to help inform land management policies that create safe pathways for grizzlies to move through human dominated areas and regulate recreation with bears in mind, Servheen said.

"If we want to have bears in the future, we need to think about the needs bears have for some level of space on the landscape," Servheen said.

Securing that space across the vast Yellowstone to Yukon landscape requires more than just land acquisitions and highway overpasses — it requires increasing public awareness and counteracting the perception that bears are inherently aggressive and irrational, Proctor said. If people understand bear behavior, they can learn to act in ways that neither attract bears nor threaten them. And understanding the totality of bears’ strong drive to survive, and protect each other, can elicit empathy and motivation to protect this iconic species.

Early in his career, Proctor captured, immobilized and radio-collared a mother grizzly with her two yearlings, or newly adolescent bears. While the research team worked, the young bears circled quietly at a distance. When the scientists finally stepped back and the mother began to stir, the yearlings approached cautiously. As the mother's groggy head rested on a log, the yearlings' long-clawed front paws delicately explored the radio collar. Then, each one rested its head directly on hers, to form a quiet pile of three bear heads.

"They just wanted to touch mom after this ordeal," Proctor said. "Yes, grizzlies can be rough and dangerous but they can also be gentle at times," Proctor said.

Reporting and travel for this story was supported by the Sitka Foundation and the Science Media Centre of Canada.

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Dinosaurs are more than extraordinary specimens with massive price tags. They are irreplaceable snapshots of our planet's history and our own human journey. When scientifically important fossils are reduced to luxury commodities, we are robbed of the evidence that makes them valuable in the first place.

On Oct. 27, a 19.6-foot-long (6 meters) skeleton of Nanotyrannus lancensis known as "Jodi" was sold at Sotheby's in New York for $47,255,000, far exceeding its $6 million to $9 million estimate. The buyer and seller were not identified. It was the latest in a string of multimillion-dollar dinosaur auctions, following the $50.1 million sale of a T. rex (Gus) in July and the $44.6 million sale of a Stegosaurus (Apex) in 2024.

Fossils like Jodi, Apex, and Gus belong in public collections, where they can contribute to science and remain accessible for future generations. Not in the hands of private collectors.

There are three main reasons why. First: Fossils are evidence, not objects. A dinosaur's bones can reveal how it grew, moved, fed, and lived. They preserve traces of injury and disease, help reconstruct ancient ecosystems, and offer clues about the "rules of life" governing our world that scientists are still learning to interpret.

Jodi illustrates exactly why access to physical evidence matters. For nearly half a century, paleontologists debated whether Nanotyrannus was a distinct dinosaur or simply a juvenile T. rex. A lack of well-preserved fossils available for study only fueled the uncertainty. And then a remarkable specimen, once in private hands, moved into the public trust.

The fossil was uncovered in Montana in 2006 alongside a Triceratops. Dubbed the "Dueling Dinosaurs," it took until 2022, and an appeal in the state's Supreme Court, for the remains to be acquired by the Museum of Natural Sciences so they could be fully studied. This research provided a powerful new perspective, arguing that Nanotyrannus lancensis was a distinct dinosaur and, moreover, that a second species of Nanotyrannus once roamed the American West.

This hypothesis has big implications for the health of ecosystems before one of Earth's most severe extinction events — but it currently rests on the scant few Nanotyrannus specimens housed in public collections. Specimens like Jodi could uphold or dethrone it. Without access, we, and Jodi’s true identity, will remain in the dark.

It is hard to overstate the irony of Jodi's sale: a specimen recently listed as a juvenile T. rex now captures the world's imagination, and commands double the price tag, as a "Nanotyrannus." Yet if a similar fate had befallen the Dueling Dinosaurs and they had remained in private hands, we would not have known for certain that Nanotyrannus ever existed.

Scientific progress depends on researchers being able to compare specimens, test hypotheses, and revisit earlier conclusions. When access relies on a private owner's permission, repeatability is not assured, and science cannot proceed. A specimen might be available today but inaccessible tomorrow. This is why access to the evidence must endure.

This brings us to the second problem with privately owned dinosaurs. Digital scans cannot replace the original fossil.

Three-dimensional scans and digital models are powerful tools. We use them to measure bones, compare anatomy, share information, and educate the public. But digital models capture only the most superficial aspects of a fossil's story.

To understand dinosaur growth, we examine microscopic structures inside fossilized bone through a technique called bone histology. We also analyze the chemistry of fossils to investigate diet, migration patterns, and metabolism. Such work requires physical samples, not just images of a bone's surface. We also need contextual data about the surrounding sediments, preservation mode, and ancient environment in order to explore questions about the ecosystems in which the animals once lived. Much of this information is lost in the rush to excavate and prepare fossils as quickly as possible for the auction block. It can never be reclaimed.

We cannot predict what novel technologies future researchers will employ to make new discoveries from old bones, or even which questions they will ask. Technology will continue to advance, bringing analytical methods we cannot anticipate. A scan made today does not guarantee that researchers will have the physical evidence needed for tomorrow's discoveries. Digital access should complement preservation of original specimens, not justify losing it.

Finally, private ownership cannot guarantee lasting public access. Yes, some private collectors financially support research and education and donate specimens they purchase. Those contributions are valuable. But the issue is not whether an individual owner is generous; it is whether access is guaranteed over time.

A temporary loan is insufficient. A loaned specimen can be withdrawn, sold, or inherited by someone with different priorities, situations that are becoming increasingly common in the U.S. and abroad. By contrast, a fossil deposited in a responsible public research institution is documented, cared for, studied, and made available to future researchers and educators in perpetuity. The question is not whether people should be able to admire dinosaurs; it is whether the evidence that helps us understand them will remain available to everyone.

Nor should museums consider selling scientifically important fossils to cover operating shortfalls. Collections are not ordinary financial assets to liquidate when budgets tighten. Selling an irreplaceable specimen provides a one-time payment while sacrificing future scientific potential. Museums need sustainable funding for collections care, research, and education, not pressure to trade away the very resources they exist to preserve.

Jodi's sale is complete, but the fossil's long-term future remains uncertain. With the buyer's identity undisclosed, the public cannot know what arrangements, if any, will ensure continued access for researchers and educators. We hope the new owner will make Jodi available for scientific study and public education, through permanent placement in a public research institution. But hope is not a substitute for a guarantee.

There is a better way to support paleontology. Enthusiasts who want to share in the excitement of discovery can fund fieldwork and research, endow curatorial positions, strengthen museum collections, or donate important fossils to public institutions where we can all learn from them.

Dinosaurs inspire wonder because they connect us to a world vastly different from our own. But their importance extends far beyond their power to captivate us. They are part of our shared natural heritage and an irreplaceable record of Earth's history.

We should measure a dinosaur's worth not by the price it commands at auction, but by the knowledge it can help us build, and by whether we preserve that opportunity for generations to come. Earth's history belongs to all of us, not to the highest bidder.

Editor's note: This article was updated on Nov. 4 at 8.22 a.m. ET to correct the year the Museum of Natural Sciences acquired the Dueling Dinosaurs.

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Red blood cells found in a 115 million-year-old dinosaur fossil from Brazil are the oldest chemical evidence of blood-related material in a dinosaur fossil, a new study claims.

However, not everyone agrees with the research team's conclusions, with some experts saying the shape doesn't match those of reptilian red blood cells.

In the new research, published Monday (Nov. 2) in the journal PNAS, the scientists said they identified microscopic structures resembling red blood cells alongside chemical signatures of heme, the oxygen-carrying component of hemoglobin.

The new findings come from limb bones of a roughly 10-foot-long (3 meters) dinosaur called Aratasaurus museunacionali. While previous research has detected blood in dinosaur fossils, this is the first study to use chemical processes to identify heme-based signatures in dinosaur bones.

"Traditionally, fossils give us information through bones, teeth, shells and morphology. But exceptionally preserved fossils may contain another archive of information: microscopic structures and molecular traces of the original organism," study co-author Kliti Grice, a professor in the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Curtin University in Australia, told Live Science via email. "That opens the possibility of asking questions about ancient biology that skeletal anatomy alone cannot answer."

Deep in the bones

The team was not originally looking for traces of dinosaur blood, Grice said. Her research was driven by a broader question: How much of an ancient organism's original biology can survive fossilization?

To investigate, Grice and her team studied the limb bones of A. museunacionali, an extinct species of small theropod that lived during the Early Cretaceous period in Brazil. Theropods were a group of mostly meat-eating dinosaurs that walked on two legs. They included famous predators such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor.

Using microscopic and chemical analysis on the theropod's limb bones, the researchers found numerous microscopic structures within vascular canals, channels that once carried blood vessels through the bone. Their shape, size and location were consistent with red blood cells, the team said.

"We combined microscopy, mineralogical analyses and molecular geochemistry," Grice said. "Critically, we investigated the chemistry in situ [in the bone itself], so we could relate the chemical signals to the microscopic structures in their physical context within the fossil. That is much stronger than simply extracting molecules from a piece of fossil and assuming where they originated."

The team's chemical analyses detected preserved heme-related compounds associated with these structures, providing more chemical evidence to support the idea that the finding could be traces of dinosaur blood, as heme is the iron-containing, ring-shaped molecule that forms a key part of the molecule hemoglobin in red blood cells.

A time capsule

Grice and the team think the conditions the theropod dinosaur was buried in could have helped preserve the vascular structures and the red blood cells within them. They suggested that the animal was rapidly covered by sediment in a low-oxygen environment containing microbial mats ‪—‬ thin biofilms made of microorganisms. These conditions may have altered the normal process of decomposition, helping to preserve the microscopic structures and associated chemical signatures.

"The red-blood-cell-like structures were mineralised with hausmannite, a manganese oxide mineral (Mn₃O₄)," Grice said. "We think early mineralisation helped stabilise or replicate microscopic biological structures before they were completely destroyed, while aspects of the associated chemistry also survived in altered form."

The fossil also contained preserved amino acids associated with collagen, the structural protein found in bone.

Not everyone is convinced

While blood has been found in dinosaur fossils before, not everyone agrees that these latest findings are truly red blood cells.

"I very much appreciate this team bringing rigor to the study of deep time fossils," said Mary Schweitzer, a molecular paleontologist at North Carolina State University who was not involved in the study but has previously studied soft tissues from the dinosaur age. "I am in agreement that endogenous [produced within the body] molecules can persist over geological time in some form, and that there is much these can teach us. However, I am not convinced that the images they figure are remnant RBCs [red blood cells] for several reasons."

For one, the structures do not convincingly match the expected appearance of red blood cells in nonmammalian animals, Schweitzer said. Unlike mammalian red blood cells, which lose their nuclei during development, those of birds and reptiles retain their nuclei. This typically produces a characteristic nuclear bulge in the shape of the cell.

According to Schweitzer, the latest findings show the microstructures having more of a concave shape with no nuclear bulge. The structures also were smaller than most non-mammalian red blood cells, "so morphological similarity is not met," Schweitzer said.

"I appreciate these authors bringing technological innovations to the study of dinosaur fossils," she said. "I am excited to see that this team and others are moving forward with a molecular approach to ancient fossil remains."

Editor's Note: This article was updated at 5:44 p.m. E.D.T. to remove an outside comment that suggested the study did not include resonance Raman spectroscopy. The team did perform that analysis.

For nine months, a scientific expedition searched for blue whales in the waters around the Galápagos Islands but found none. Between October 2025 and July 2026, the researchers surveyed areas of the Ecuadorian archipelago where the giants had historically been recorded, hoping to attach satellite tags and learn more about the animals' migratory routes. The search ended without the team tagging a single whale.

The absence coincided with unusually warm ocean conditions during an El Niño event. Sea surface temperatures were as high as 82 degrees Fahrenheit (28 degrees Celsius), while at a depth of 330 feet (100 meters) water temperatures ranged from 66 to 67 F (18.9 to 19.4 C) — up to 9 F (5 C) warmer than usual for that time of the year.

This raised the possibility that El Niño changed where blue whales were finding food and, in turn, where they went. The researchers suspect the animals may be seeking colder, more productive waters. However, the whales themselves are still missing.

"The hypothesis is that the whales are staying in areas with greater productivity [more food] farther south, in waters with slightly cooler temperatures," Daniela Alarcón, the expedition's leader and a researcher at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito's Galápagos campus and the Galápagos Science Center, told Live Science.

As to where the missing whales have gone, possibilities include the waters off Peru and offshore areas where the animals could go undetected. In this scenario, the unusually warm waters around the Galápagos Islands would act as a "temperature barrier," Alarcón said, preventing them from feeding in the archipelago's waters.

Why water temperature matters

Blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus) can consume up to 12,100 pounds (5,500 kilograms) of krill — small crustaceans that make up the whales' primary food source — every day. That means they need to find areas with enough food to sustain them.

"These are very large animals that need to move to areas where they can keep feeding," Alarcón said.

It's not yet clear whether this year's El Niño caused a krill shortage in the waters off the Galápagos, but some indirect evidence points that way.

Past expeditions suggested that blue whales tend to feed in water layers around 71 F, which this season was identified around the Galápagos at a depth of about 197 feet (92 m). By contrast, peak chlorophyll concentrations, an indirect indicator of abundance of the krill's food source, phytoplankton ‪—‬ were recorded much higher in the water column, at between 39 and 121 feet (12 to 37 m) below the surface. Because krill abundance wasn't directly measured, that data suggests, but does not establish, that there was a mismatch between the whales' preferred feeding layer and the presence of their food.

"Honestly, we had never encountered such unusual conditions before," Juan Pablo Muñoz, a marine biologist at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito who was also on the expedition, told Live Science.

Continuation of a trend

The whales' absence did not come as a complete surprise to the team. Sightings had already begun to decline before the most recent expedition. Reports submitted through Cetácea Galápagos, a citizen science network, began to dwindle between August and September 2025. There were two isolated reports of blue whales, in May and June 2026, but the team could not confirm either one, despite intensifying its search.

"We knew conditions wouldn't be the same, but we thought that if we put in more effort, we might be able to find some individuals. But we searched, and searched, and searched — and found nothing," Alarcón recalled.

Part of that could be down to the elusive nature of the giant creatures. Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae)are generally easier to spot, Muñoz noted. In some places, they can be seen from the shore or after a half-hour boat ride. Blue whales, by contrast, rarely approach mainland Ecuador's coast and tend to stay far from populated areas in the Galápagos.

Sensitive to temperature fluctuations

Fernando Félix, a marine biologist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador who was not part of the expedition, was unsurprised by the result.

"We already knew there wouldn't be any blue whales in the Galápagos," said Félix, who is also a researcher at the Whale Museum (Museo de Ballenas).

Félix told Live Science that there are historical precedents for this behavior in the southeastern Pacific. During the 1982-1983 El Niño, which also brought substantial ocean warming, blue whales and other species, including fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus) and Bryde's whales (Balaenoptera brydei), were recorded shifting southward.

"We might think that because they are 'just animals,' they lack memory or don't understand these processes — but we would be wrong," Félix said. "They can clearly sense that when temperatures are unusually high as they travel north from the south, vertical mixing has been disrupted and there is no food in the Galápagos. They perceive environmental conditions and naturally direct their movements toward areas where they believe feeding conditions are better."

Rather than indicating a mass die-off, the whales' disappearance may reflect a shift in their movements in response to changing ocean conditions, Félix said.

"I don't think the whales have died," Felix said. "They simply didn't go to the Galápagos region. They went elsewhere, where conditions were better."

This response to environmental conditions may also have impacted dolphin movements. Pods may have moved toward colder waters, where food could be more abundant, or may have even dispersed, Félix suggested.

When will blue whales return to the Galápagos?

El Niño's effects will likely persist over the coming months. "Between January and May 2027, we'll have warm water coming from the north and warm water coming from the west," Félix warned. "This is going to hit us extremely hard."

Blue whales, humpback whales and dolphins would likely return to Galápagos waters once El Niño subsides and ocean conditions begin to normalize. He said pelagic fish (species that live in the water column rather than on or near the seafloor) ‪—‬ including tuna, swordfish, anchovies and sardines, which have also moved toward colder waters ‪—‬ would return as well.

Muñoz agreed. Krill populations can rebound just one to three months after cold, nutrient-rich waters begin to rise to the surface. More whale sightings were recorded in the years following the 2015 and 2023 El Niño events. Based on these precedents, he suggested that 2028 could be a promising year if cold water returns to the surface. "The system bounces back," he said.

Félix compared El Niño to a computer restart. "It resets the environment, allowing ecological processes to begin again," he said. He's confident that blue whales will return to the area. "I can guarantee that there will be large numbers of blue whales at this time in 2028," he told Live Science.

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Most trickery in nature happens without a shred of awareness behind it. An orchid mantis (Hymenopus coronatus) doesn't know it looks like a flower, and a moth with eyespots on its wings has no concept of the predator it's startling. These are adaptations shaped by natural selection over countless generations, not conscious choices. But a smaller set of animal behaviors look like something else entirely — deliberate tactical, and aimed at manipulating another individual's beliefs, the same way human lies do.

Figuring out which is which turns out to be one of the trickiest questions in animal behavior research, James O'Hanlon, zoologist and science communicator, told Live Science.

In this excerpt from his new book, "Liars, Cheats and Copycats: Trickery and Deception in Nature" (Columbia University Press, 2026), O'Hanlon explores camouflage, mimicry and misdirection throughout the natural world, building toward the book's central question: Can animals tell lies?

In it, O'Hanlon examines one of the strongest candidates for an animal that deliberately lies: the fork-tailed drongo (Dicrurus adsimilis), a small African bird whose ever-changing repertoire of false alarm calls has made it a favorite subject for scientists studying tactical deception.

James O'Hanlon interview: 'You start painting pictures of squirrels twirling their mustaches': A biologist on whether animals can lie

Fork-tailed drongos are remarkable vocal mimics and can do an uncanny impression of a meerkat alarm call. The meerkats respond to it just as they would one of their own and scamper to safety. Meanwhile the drongo flies in once more to steal the meerkats' abandoned food.

They don't stop there; drongos mimic a whole range of other animals' signals, mimicking various avian neighbors like the caped glossy starling or the pied babbler. Those ever-watchful meerkats fall for the ruse once more, leaving their meals behind. Researchers have identified over fifty unique deceptive vocalizations in the drongo's arsenal.

By constantly rotating their "cry-wolf" tactics, these birds ensure their victims don't grow wise to the deception, allowing the theft to continue unabated. Yet, their cleverness isn't reserved solely for exploited meerkats.

This remarkable talent for mimicry extends to other creatures as well. Pied babblers and sociable weavers, who both forage in groups upon the earth, frequently find themselves bamboozled into fleeing their food by these false warnings. Had the legendary boy who cried wolf possessed such adaptive ingenuity, he might have successfully maintained his trickery.

It would, however, have resulted in a peculiar fable with an entirely different, perhaps darker, moral lesson.

It's early days in our understanding of whether animals can tell lies. Social group-living animals are likely candidates for finding animal tricksters in the wild, and we have only scratched the surface of what kinds of trickery goes on in these societies. Time will tell whether similar forms of deception are happening in the subsonic songs of whales and dolphins, the chemical mists of ants and termites, or the barks and howls of wild dogs.

Despite the growing list of evidence, scientists are still hesitant to conclude definitively that animals can intentionally deceive another, in a similar way to humans. This might have more to do with the professional conduct of scientists than it has to do with the reality of what goes on in animal societies.

Firstly, one of the most important rules in studying animal behaviour is to not anthropomorphise animals. In other words, don't project human-like qualities or emotions onto other species. Scientists must be completely objective and not assume that other animals think, behave or make decisions for the same reasons we do.

Since lying has always been perceived as a human behaviour, scientists are incredibly hesitant to conclude that it could be happening in other animals.

The second reason is that scientists are trained to never definitively conclude anything. There is an idea in science that you can disprove things, but never really prove things. This is why you will find scientific writing littered with phrases like "the evidence suggests," "it's probable that," or — my personal favourite — "the most parsimonious explanation is," and so on and so forth.

A professional scientist will often give a direct "No" answer but rarely a direct "Yes." It's like squeezing blood from a stone. But this is a good thing. What often sounds like indecisiveness or a lack of certainty is actually just good professional practice. It's part of a scientist's job description — to consider all possible explanations for the observations they have made and examine every possibility on its own merits.

Then the conclusions that are drawn come down to which of these possibilities is most likely. In a universe of infinite possibilities and scales of enquiry, it would take an impossible amount of overwhelming data for scientists to exclude all possibilities but one.

This article is adapted from Liars, Cheats, and Copycats: Trickery and Deception in Nature by James O’Hanlon . Copyright © James O’Hanlon 2027, 2025 First published in Australia by NewSouth, an imprint of UNSW Press Ltd. Used by arrangement with Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

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Most deception in nature happens without much awareness from the creature involved. From a moth that has evolved to look like a hornet to orchid mantises that mimic flowers to lure in pollinators, deception is part of these animals' nature. But in his book "Liars, Cheats and Copycats: Trickery and Deception in Nature" (Columbia University Press, 2026), biologist James O'Hanlon turns to tactical deception aimed at manipulating what another animal believes — and whether we can consider this as lying.

Live Science spoke with O'Hanlon about his book, and why so many scientists are reluctant to say "yes, animals can lie."

Read an excerpt: Can animals lie? This sneaky bird might be proof.

Olivia Maule: The chapter opens with a moment from a talk you gave, where a woman at a senior citizens' club asked you a question about orchid mantises that left you stumped: "How does the mantis know to look like a flower?" Why did that moment stick with you enough to open the chapter with it?

James O'Hanlon: Because it was such a simple, straightforward question that I couldn't give a simple, straightforward answer to. At the time, I was thinking about what's going on in the brains of the animals I was looking at — does a camouflaged animal actually know it's camouflaged? Does an insect that looks like a leaf know what a leaf even is?

And it got me thinking: they don't need to. This stuff just sort of works because it works. That's a completely different type of deception to the other things dealt with in this chapter, which is: Do animals actually know that they can lie? Can they intentionally deceive, like we can?

OM: So would you say you have an answer to that question now? And if so, what would it be?

JO: If I had to answer, it would be yes. It looks like it. But scientists are paid to be pedantic, so it's always going to be a "yes, but" or a "possibly." There's a ton of behaviors that look like animals can lie, and they're really good at it, but with any type of science, we're never going to know for certain what's going on in their brains. It's a best-guess situation.

OM: How would you help readers hold those two ideas at once — that this is genuine deception in an evolutionary sense, but not necessarily lying in the way we mean it as humans?

JO: When we talk about lying in humans, there's a value judgment attached. We're judging each other on whether we're good or bad people, doing right or wrong things. We kind of have to relax that judgment a bit when we're talking about other animals.

I guess it becomes an ethical question — we look at deception as being right or wrong, morally good or bad, and that's a very human-centric way of thinking. Ethics and morals are things we've developed to help us get along in our own societies. Who knows what's going on in animal societies?

There's an example in the book of golden snub-nosed monkeys that use deceptive alarm calls to scare off other members of their group and steal their food. After a while, those monkeys start to get ignored, and the group stops responding to their calls. So maybe there is some sort of animal-society rules and regulations keeping lying in check. Maybe. We'll see.

OM: I do want to ask about the chimpanzee study, in which chimpanzees intentionally misled competitive handlers to boxes without food, and compare it to the 2017 dog study, where dogs learned to mislead handlers much faster than the chimps did. What did that result do to the assumption that big brains equal better lying?

JO: There's always been this idea that lying is a really cognitively complex task — you need the brains not just to realize what's going on in the real world but to imagine a false possibility, and then to describe that false possibility as if it were real. We talked that up as something you need big brains to do, and there was also a bit of patting ourselves on the back for being such smart animals — maybe we lie a lot because we're such smart animals. But the more we learn about animals and what they're capable of, the more we realize they can do so much more than we thought was possible with the brains they've got.

OM: Does that suggest lying is less about raw intelligence and more a byproduct of needing to survive in a group?

JO: As far as all the examples of tactical deception in the book that look like they're intentional, they all, or mostly all, come from social animals. We don't seem to see it in solitary animals. That's a big sign that maybe it's something that's evolved because individuals can exploit it in a social setting. But it's still such early days, so it's hard to say for definite how different levels of sociality, and how bonded individuals are within groups, correlate with more deception.

OM: Could you elaborate on the distinction between deception and something like the camouflage you introduce in the book with the tiger's stripes?

JO: Compared to the intentional deception we've been talking about, things like camouflage still work regardless of whether the animal doing it is aware of it or not. The idea behind lying and tactical deception is that it only works because it's intentional — there's some sort of choice to do it.

Whether the animals are aware of that choice is another question. Think about the way we do it as humans — are we always aware of it? Whenever your friend asks whether you like their new haircut and you just go, "Yeah, it's great," you don't really think about the fact that you're probably lying. It's just part of our social norms. So it becomes a very blurry gray area very quickly.

OM: It sort of boils down to the choice of it all — whether they can choose to do it or not, which raises the question of whether it's conscious or unconscious.

JO: It's tricky, because as soon as you start talking about it being a conscious decision these animals make, you start painting pictures of squirrels twirling their mustaches, giggling at how evil they are for pretending to hide nuts. And you start to think, maybe this isn't the right exact way to think about lying and deception.

OM: The drongo — a bird renowned for its ability to deceive meerkats — doesn't just have one trick, it cycles through different alarm calls and borrows calls from other bird species. Does that put it in a different category of liar than squirrels or monkeys, or is it the same trick with a different toolbox?

JO: It could just be the same trick with a different toolbox. It's essentially doing the same thing as the golden snub-nosed monkeys we were talking about before. But birds are incredible singers and have very flexible call structures, and there are tons of birds that can mimic other birds. Maybe you just pair that ability with this deception adaptation, and it looks a bit different, but it's the same kind of trick.

OM: Do you think these behaviors are inherited, or just innate characteristics of the drongos themselves?

JO: I don't know — I'd be interested to find out. The evolutionary aspect would be that the ones who can do it get more food and are better able to survive and reproduce. Whether they learn it from their parents, it's entirely possible. We know from birds in general that they learn calls from their parents and their social groups, and there are even studies showing birds will start learning calls while they're still in the egg, listening to their parents' calls. So it's entirely possible they learn this trick socially, as far as I know.

OM: In writing this book, what did you find is the best way to approach understanding animal behavior as it relates to human traits like lying or deception?

JO: I think there's still a little bit of baggage from old-school thinking, that you need bigger brains to be deceptive and tricky in this way, and there are still people who think it must be things like the higher apes and great apes that are capable of this stuff.

As soon as you start studying that in something like an invertebrate, it's really hard to get the idea out there — other scientists will come back and say, "No, that couldn't be possible, this must be some other type of behavior, or it just looks like tactical deception, but it's not." This happened with the researchers who did the work on cuttlefish that change one side of their body to look like a male and the other to look like a female — there was a lot of resistance to that idea, seemingly just because it was a cuttlefish, this little invertebrate, so it couldn't possibly be capable of such cleverness. But as far as the actual evidence goes, and what we can see, it's really no different from what we see in these big-brained mammals, so why not assume the same thing is going on?

A lot of it comes down to the culture and practice of science, and the people doing the science. We're supposed to be as objective as possible, but we're still humans, we're still animals. It takes a while for ideas to change.

OM: Is there a risk that this caution has become its own kind of bias, where we assume human specialness by default until proven otherwise?

JO: Yeah, definitely. It's important, as part of scientific practice, to be as objective as possible, and as a general rule, to not anthropomorphize. But at the same time, we're just animals too — we're just another one of the great apes. We share characteristics with lots of different animals, so it's not a huge stretch to think that what's going on in our brains is also going to be similar to what's going on in other animal brains.

It's just a question of when we apply that kind of thinking, and when it's useful or not. Something similar happened in the field of understanding pain in animals — scientists studying this were always trying not to anthropomorphize, not to assume animals experienced pain the way we did. Then, the more we understood it, it became quite clear that they probably did, and it almost became an ethical question to stop with the anti-anthropomorphizing and instead go, no, we know what pain feels like, we can say that.

We're never going to be able to see what's going on in their brains, but that doesn't excuse us from recognizing what's going on. So I think it became okay not to anthropomorphize but to recognize the similarities between humans and other animals, as opposed to always hinging on the differences between us.

OM: At the end of the chapter, you say that if you buy a scientist a few drinks, they'll eventually admit that animals can lie. I obviously can't buy you a drink over email, so I'll just ask you directly — do you think animals can lie?

JO: Yeah. I'll give a straightforward yes, because I can.

You need to get scientists out of their professional mindset, where they're trained to give the most correct answer that they can. And yes is a bit of a broad-stroke answer for a scientist when they're in professional mode, which is why you need to get them out of the lab and out to a bar or a cafe, and get them talking in human terms again.

OM: What would you say is your favorite example in the book — what are you most excited for readers to walk away with?

JO: I'll go with the cuttlefish example — the one where a male cuttlefish will put male color patterns on one side of its body and female patterns on the other, to trick other male cuttlefish. It might be my favorite because, as a young student, I worked on this particular species of cuttlefish. We were studying them, watching all of their crazy color-changing abilities, and just wondering what on earth they must be talking about, what was going on there. Then, years later, seeing the aforementioned research come out was this sort of lightbulb moment — that's what I was watching them do all along. I think that has a personal connection for me. I spent so much time looking at these creatures, being mesmerized by what they were doing, with no idea what was going on. So it was great to see scientists come in and figure it out, and answer those questions.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

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You may have heard that sharks are older than trees. And yes, sharks are truly ancient, with an evolutionary lineage dating back hundreds of millions of years.

But are they really older than trees? Experts told Live Science that the answer depends on what we classify as a shark.

"It's all in the fine print," John Maisey, the curator-in-charge emeritus of fossil fish at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, told Live Science. "The takeaway is that the shark lineage within the fishes generally does go back further than trees. But it really depends on how you define what we mean by shark."

The modern sharks we see today first emerged around 195 million years ago, during the Jurassic period. Fossils of ancient sharks from this time can be traced to living lineages, namely Hexanchiformes, an order of sharks identified by their six or seven gills and single dorsal fin.

This means that modern sharks, at least, are not older than trees. Experts generally agree that trees first evolved in the Middle Devonian epoch, around 380 million to 390 million years ago. "I think it's not very controversial, when we had the first trees," Cindy Looy, a paleobotanist at the University of California, Berkeley, told Live Science.

For instance, the first true tree in the evolutionary record is considered to be Archaeopteris, an extinct genus discovered in a 385 million-year-old fossil forest near Cairo, New York. Looking at these fossils, Archaeopteris has many characteristics of trees we have today, including a tall, woody trunk; leaves; and a deep root system. Other early trees ‪—‬ such as Eospermatopteris found in ancient forests near Gilboa, New York, and Calamophyton in southwest England ‪—‬ also appeared in the fossil record 390 million and 393 million years ago, respectively.

But when we look at the extinct relatives of modern sharks, "that's where it gets a bit wobbly," Maisey said. There are fossils from the sister groups of modern sharks that can be traced back through the Permian period and into the Devonian period (around 359 million to 420 million years ago). The most abundant group are hybodonts, an extinct group of spiny fish that have a unique calcification pattern in their cartilage that is similar to that of modern sharks.

"It’s called tessellated calcified cartilage, and that's a very important hallmark of most of the shark-like fishes and their ancestors," said Maisey, who has studied a spiny fish fossil called Doliodus problematicus from the early Devonian. If this definition is used, these sharks first appeared around 400 million years ago, before trees emerged.

Sharks' rough skin can be traced even further back, with the dermal denticles — the tooth-like scales that roughen a shark's skin — first appearing in the fossil record around 450 million years ago.

These transition fossils, where fish were evolving into sharks and gaining shark-like traits, introduce a gray area in the definition of sharks. "When you get back into the ancient past, when you're not dealing with things that we have living examples to compare with anymore, then it becomes a bit more tricky [to figure out what they are]," Maisey said.

Fossils also present a very limited picture. Many contain only fragments of an animal, like a fallen tooth, so scientists are still piecing together the clues of exactly how and when sharks arose. That means every fish fossil discovery often leads to more questions about what other transition fossils could be out there, Maisey said.

There is also much to be discovered about trees, Looy added. Terrestrial fossils, especially ones that clearly show parts of a tree, are quite rare. Finding a fossil forest requires a lot of luck, she said, although there is little indication that trees were present before the Middle Devonian.

"That's why I think the fossil record is so intriguing," Maisey said. "Because it may not give us all the answers, but it certainly raises questions."

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

A male tiger approaches his cubs and greets them with a head-bobbing motion while their mother rests nearby. The surprising interaction, captured in the PBS Nature documentary "Tiger Island," a two-part series that follows two big-cat families across Nepal.

The footage marks the first time a tiger "family" has been documented spending time together, and it could challenge conventional assumptions about how the seemingly solitary cats behave around their young, said Dan O'Neill, a wildlife biologist and filmmaker who contributed to "Tiger Island." Previously, it was thought that tiger moms raise their cubs for up to two years without any help from the male tiger.

But this may not be the norm.

"It just shows that we really know nothing about them," O'Neill told Live Science. "And they're so much more complex than people realize."

That's just one of the scenes in Tiger Island that challenges our understanding of the tigers' solitary nature. In another scene, a female tiger cares for another tigress's cubs.

"We have these very rigid ideas of how these animals live," O'Neill told Live Science. But the natural world is "diverse and ever-changing," and tigers are no exception, he said.

The footage of the female caring for another tiger's cubs could offer clues about how mother tigers protect their young. Male tigers, like male lions, sometimes kill cubs ‪—‬ a behavior known as infanticide ‪—‬ particularly when a new male takes over a territory. Allowing another female tiger to care for cubs might help more cubs survive to adulthood, O'Neill suggested. Previous observations of female tigers have shown females helping to co-parent each other's cubs, but it's a rare event.

To capture these scenes, the crew used drones with powerful optical-zoom lenses and quiet propellers to observe the tigers in places that were difficult to access without disturbing the big cats. Traditional camera traps often capture animals along trails, leaving much of their private lives unseen. O'Neill noted that the drone propellers were quieter than the local bees where the filming took place, thus giving the crew candid views of the tigers as they went about their lives.

Solitary animals in urban jungles

Though tigers (Panthera tigris) are solitary animals, they often live close to or share habitat with human communities. That means tigers sometimes attack people and kill livestock, O'Neill said. "It would be absolutely naive and wrong to suggest that they [attacks on people] don't happen," O'Neill said. As a result, conservation efforts must account for the circumstances in which people and big cats encounter one another, rather than treating human communities as separate from wildlife, he said.

The same issue affects other big cats. O'Neill, a researcher with the wild-cat conservation organization Panthera, has spent years studying jaguars, pumas and snow leopards. He said the popular image of these animals living in remote wilderness can obscure how closely they overlap with human lives.

For O'Neill, conservation requires more than studying the animals' behaviors or protecting their habitats. It also means helping people who bear the cost of living alongside these apex predators.

"Helping those people is how you help tiger conservation," he said.

In the U.S. "Tiger Island" Part Two airs on Wednesday, Oct. 28 at 12:30 am on the PBS channel.

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

Over the past six years, orcas have made headlines for a unique behavior: Some individuals have repeatedly damaged or destroyed rudders on boats. The behavior has prompted a wide range of explanations, including that it's playful, a form of revenge, a warning against getting too close to the pod, or even a type of cultural transmission, in which one orca observes another interacting with a boat and then imitates it.

But Christian Frings, a cognitive psychologist who studies how humans control their actions, thinks it could be deliberate.

While Frings, who is also chair of general psychology and methodology at Trier University in Germany, does not study orcas directly, he believes that theories developed to explain human behavior could provide insight into this orca behavior. Orcas (Orcinus orca), he said, may be a "test case" for whether a wide variety of species can anticipate how their actions will change the environment and then take those actions deliberately, with the goal of making those changes.

He published his theory as a commentary Sept. 8 in the journal Animal Cognition.

This doesn't necessarily mean orcas have wicked motives or are ramming boats with the goal of sinking them and scaring or harming people. It may be that orcas just like the sensation of smashing into a rudder or being in the water with a wonky, disabled boat. Once they learn this, they anticipate the effect — for example, how a boat moves or feels when the rudder is damaged — and then carry out the learned action sequence that creates that effect.

Frings' theory doesn't attempt to explain why orcas (also called killer whales) would seek to damage a boat or rudder. "Why they want this effect is a secondary question and while of course interesting it touches a quite different topic," Frings told Live Science via email.

Live Science spoke with Frings about his hypothesis and why theories that describe how humans execute a series of motor behaviors — called action control frameworks — might help us understand how other complex animals behave in the wild.

Kenna Hughes-Castleberry: Why is it important to study orca behavior, and what can studying orcas tell us about animal cognition?

Christian Frings: In truth, I'm the wrong person to get that question because I should mention right from the start that I'm a cognitive psychologist. So usually, I'm studying human behavior. So, it's not really that I'm interested in orcas, per se, more in the question of what is actually comparable between human action control, human cognition and animal cognition.

KHC: Can you explain the action-control framework for our readers?

CF: It's a group of theories. The most important point is that agents — humans and maybe orcas — control their actions by actually anticipating the behavioral and the sensory consequences of their actions.

So let's take the example of turning the light on. The action starts with anticipating how it will look when the light is turned on. It does not start with pressing the light switch. It starts with the visual effect you're going to produce. This visual effect then actually retrieves from memory a motor program, and this motor program actually produces the anticipated effect. So it's all about anticipating action effects.

In the human action-control literature, that is the most dominant view from different theories of how humans actually control their behavior: by anticipating the effects they're going to produce.

KHC: How does that apply to the orca behavior?

CF: The typical explanation for [the boat-attacking behavior] is more stimulus response or cultural transmission. Stimulus response would mean, in this case, the rudder elicits an approach or attack behavior. So any rudder should just elicit this behavior. [Editor's note: Stimulus-response theory is a psychological concept in which a stimulus triggers a particular response from an individual. Examples include a cat being sprayed with water when on the couch and jumping off the couch in response, or a dog salivating when it smells food.]

Cultural transmission would actually be observational learning. That means one orca sees how another orca is attacking a rudder and then just imitates the behavior.

I'm not saying that these explanations [stimulus response or cultural transmission] are wrong, by the way. I just want to add an additional layer of explanation.

I suggest that they actually anticipate the sensory consequences of their action. So maybe they anticipate how it would look and how it would feel if they destroy the rudder. I would not call it [their behavior] play, but maybe they're just testing or probing what kind of effect they're going to produce.

It's a little bit like human babies, when they start to move — or move their arms or move their legs — they're also typically trying to produce effects, right? It's also when they develop language, this kind of babbling, right? That is a kind of testing or probing action effects.

Maybe this is something the orcas also do. I don't know. But at least it's [another theory].

KHC: So would the orca be anticipating something like the boat becoming impossible to steer?

CF: Actually, no. Let's assume for a moment it [that a broken rudder is] what they want to produce — because they somehow anticipate how it would look and how it would feel if this yacht cannot be steered anymore.

If they can anticipate, then this anticipation of this effect will retrieve from their memory what they have to do to actually produce this effect. And it's not about [higher-order] thinking. That is a very important thing.

So we do not need human-like intentions to impose that on the orcas. I'm not saying that, because I really think it's, in a way, comparable with turning a light on. When you turn your light on, you also do not have big thoughts about that. You just want to turn your light on. So you want to produce an effect, and you do not think about all the different, quite complex muscle movements you have to do if you actually press the light switch.

I would say, again, it does not really need higher-order cognition or something like that. We do not have to impose motives or complex thoughts on the orcas for that.

KHC: What are the bigger implications if your theory is correct?

CF: My point is just to look at this behavior from this somewhat different angle, adding this layer about action effects. Because if you, for a moment, take my ideas for granted and say, "OK, maybe he has a point," then this opens up the possibility to manipulate the orca behavior.

Because if the orcas anticipate effects and this action effect produces a certain behavior, if you change the effect — let's say the rudder [material] or the shell of the boat so that the orca thinks he's producing a certain action effect — then he shows his behavior, but this behavior does not produce the action effect anymore. So the orca will probably change the behavior. It might be dangerous because it might elicit somewhat different — maybe even more dangerous — behavior of the orcas, but it might also stop it.

But it gives you a natural angle to manipulate the orca behavior. [Editor's note: In a follow-up email, Frings noted that this could involve testing a different version of the boat rudder. If the original rudder, when damaged, leaves the boat floating in a "helpless" way, a second one could be tested that allows the boat to be maneuverable even when attacked. If Frings' hypothesis is right, then by breaking the link between the orcas' planned actions (ramming the boat) and the outcome they want (helpless boat), you could change the orcas' behavior.]

But again, if you try to change it this way, it might be a little bit dangerous. So I would not suggest doing that with a boat with real people on it, because if you change the environmental consequences, they [the orcas] might actually go a little bit crazy. Maybe they might try to produce this effect with a different kind of behavior, and that could be even more aggressive. But I don't know. I can't predict that.

KHC: So the orcas are a case study to test this framework, right?

CF: Exactly. And for the general approach, it's important to try to find action frameworks that can travel across species that are not specific for one particular species. Because at the moment, we might have action-control models for humans or action-control models for the great apes.

But maybe we can just have a family of action-control frameworks, because maybe orcas and humans, and at least the great apes, control their behavior concerning action effects in quite the same way, to be honest.

Another important point here that makes it, for me personally, very interesting: This is behavior in the wild. So a lot of the research on action control is typically in the lab under very controlled conditions, so in a way, this is moving from humans to orcas but also from lab into wild behavior.

I think one misconception is actually that the models from the lab are not applicable to behavior in the wild. That's not only true for orcas; it's also true for humans. And I don't like that.

And again, this paper is a nice showcase that lab models can actually be used to explain behavior in the real world.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

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Crows are intelligent animals that can use tools, hold grudges and even host funerals. Now, new research suggests these birds can make certain decisions faster than humans and monkeys — another potential sign of their smarts, the researchers argue.

In a study published Thursday (Oct. 22) in the journal Science, researchers found that two carrion crows (Corvus corone) could distinguish the direction of moving dots on a screen in an average of 235 milliseconds, or less than a quarter of a second. By contrast, historical studies of humans suggest they make decisions in similar tasks six seconds as fast.

The birds were highly accurate, and recordings of their brain activity suggested that their decision-making process resembled that seen in primates and humans.

Given birds and mammals have evolved along separate paths for more than 310 million years, "this suggests that evolution may have independently developed similar solutions to the same computational problem," study co-author Andreas Nieder, a professor of animal physiology and director of the Institute of Neurobiology at the University of Tübingen in Germany, told Live Science in an email.

Inside a crow's split-second decision

To understand how crows make decisions using cues in their environments, the researchers trained two carrion crows to complete a visual task on a touchscreen. The birds watched a cloud of white dots moving against a black background. Some dots moved to the left or right while others moved randomly. The crows had to determine the predominant direction of the dots' movement and peck the corresponding target on the screen to earn a mealworm reward.

By changing the proportion of dots moving together, the researchers could make the decision easier or harder for the crow. When most dots moved in the same direction, the answer was fairly obvious for the birds. But when only a small percentage moved together, the birds had weaker visual evidence to base their decisions on.

The crows reached nearly 100% accuracy when many dots were involved and the motion was clear. But even when just 3% of the dots moved in concert, both birds performed significantly better than just guessing, getting the answer right 50% of the time.

The birds maintained high accuracy in different rounds of the experiment, suggesting they were not sacrificing judgement for quickness.

The study did not directly compare crows to humans and monkeys performing the exact same task. However, previous studies suggest that humans and monkeys take roughly twice as long on comparable, self-paced visual motion tasks.

What happens inside the crow brain?

To understand how the birds reached their decisions so quickly, the researchers recorded activity from 248 neurons in the nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL) — a region of the bird brain that's considered functionally comparable to the prefrontal cortex in humans and primates. Birds lack the layered cerebral cortex found in mammalian brains, but the NCL performs similarly advanced functions.

In primates, neurons accumulate sensory information and their activity increases until it hits a critical threshold and the brain reaches a decision. The new findings suggest that crows use a comparable process, the researchers concluded.

"The bigger implication is that a brain does not need a mammalian neocortex to perform sophisticated computations," Nieder said.

The team could use neural activity to predict the crows' eventual choice "as early as 70 milliseconds after" the dots appeared, Nieder said. That was roughly 170 milliseconds before the crows' behavioral responses, meaning their pecks at the screen.

The speediness of the crows' decision-making may reflect the demands of the birds' daily lives.

"Flight places enormous demands on visual processing and sensorimotor [sensation and movement] coordination," Nieder said. "Birds must navigate three-dimensional environments, avoid obstacles, and react quickly to moving objects. Finding food and capturing prey can also require rapid, precise decisions. These pressures may have favoured fast information processing."

But for now, scientists don't know why crows seem to outpace primates in this particular type of decision-making. The study included only two birds and no direct comparisons to primates, so more work could be done to confirm the results and explore that question further.

For Nieder, observing the faster decision-making process in crows raises a broader question about how scientists define intelligence.

"Rather than assuming that the mammalian brain is the blueprint for intelligent behaviour," he said, "we can study different species to discover which computational principles are shared across animals and which reflect adaptations to their particular environments."

Are you a bird nerd? Find out with our bird quiz!

Cryptic snakes in Southeast Asia have evolved a remarkable trick for evading predators: Instead of slithering, they arch their long bodies and tumble away at high speeds.

The dwarf reed snakes (Pseudorabdion) pull off this acrobatic feat by keeping their head in a relatively fixed position while rotating the rest of their body, according to a new study published Monday (Oct. 19) in the journal Current Biology.

Researchers filmed the snakes from different angles to better understand the mechanics of the rolling, or cartwheeling, behavior. They found that the snakes were capable of reaching velocities of up to 12.1 feet per second (3.69 meters per second), which is much faster than they can slither (technically referred to as undulating locomotion).

"Rolling allows them to escape from danger very quickly," study first author Yosuke Kojima, a lecturer in the biology department at Toho University in Japan, told Live Science. "In our study, their peak forward velocity during rolling was, on average, four times that of normal undulating locomotion."

Dwarf reed snakes are secretive, often nocturnal species that live across Southeast Asia, where they are prey for birds and other snakes. Although the snakes are extremely cryptic and usually hidden beneath leaves or other natural objects, people occasionally observe the serpents' dazzling rolls.

In a 2023 study, researchers formally documented the rolling behavior for the first time in one dwarf reed snake species (P. longiceps), which researchers observed in northwestern Malaysia in 2019. Kojima's team started independently observing the behavior around the same time in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, on Borneo.

"I had never seen anything like it before, and I immediately wanted to learn more about it," Kojima said.

For the new study, researchers filmed the rolling behavior multiple times in three dwarf reed species ‪—‬ P. saravacense, P. collaris and P. longiceps — between 2019 and 2022. The team also studied three reed snakes from another genus (Calamaria), which didn't perform the behavior.

Kojima said their study builds on the 2023 research by quantifying the rolling movements, confirming the overall movement pattern that research described, and revealing further details, including how the snakes stabilize their heads.

Snakes aren't the only tumblers in nature. For example, some desert spiders can roll away from danger, as can mother-of-pearl moth caterpillars (Pleurotya ruralis or Patania ruralis). However, the snakes are unique in that they seem to have good control over their rolls.

Rolling movements typically destabilize the head and disrupt sensory-guided adjustment, especially at high speeds, according to the authors of the new study. In other words, it's hard for animals to control their bodies when they're rolling around. The snakes' technique of keeping their heads relatively fixed and often elevated off the ground likely counters what would otherwise be destabilizing effects.

In addition to studying speed and form, the researchers found that the snakes could move in a relatively straight line, readily moving along a "racetrack" that was only 8 inches (20 centimeters) wide. The researchers noted that the snakes often ended their tumbling routine by diving underneath nearby objects, so they seem to remain aware of their surroundings.

The rolling is a behavioral innovation that allows the snakes to overcome their physical constraints and pull off an otherwise impossible movement, according to the researchers.

"Behavioral innovation can give rise to surprising new abilities that we would not expect from an animal's appearance alone," Kojima said.

Researchers have speculated that the bizarre behavior could surprise and confuse predators, in addition to being a rapid means of escape. The authors of the 2023 study also hypothesized that rolling would result in a patchy scent trail, and because king cobras (Ophiophagus) use scent cues to locate their prey, this could make it harder for the predators to hunt dwarf reed snakes.

How much do you know about snakes? Test your knowledge with our snake quiz!

Like their cephalopod cousins the octopuses, cuttlefish are masters of disguise.

As they hunt, these marine predators send waves of color across their skin. The rainbow display stops prey in their tracks, granting the cuttlefish just enough time to shoot out two specialized hunting tentacles at lightning speed and snatch them into range of their deadly beaks.

But can cuttlefish actually mesmerize prey with their colorful skin changes? Or is something fishier at play?

Experts told Live Science that cuttlefish are ingenious hunters, but that there's likely an even more mysterious process than hunter to prey hypnosis going down on the seafloor.

A calculated hunter

Cuttlefish are visual hunters, using their large, complex eyes to locate and track potential meals. In general, their strategy involves a slow, stealthy approach, said Bret Grasse, the manager of cephalopod operations at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole Massachusetts.

"The cuttlefish will slowly approach the prey so as to not alert the unsuspecting shrimp, fish or crab," Grasse told Live Science in an email.

During their approach, cuttlefish often put on a showy display, producing moving bands across their body. These displays are produced by a combination of light-reflecting pigment cells known as iridophores, leucophores and chromatophores. These cell types contract and expand to produce specific colors and patterns, all within milliseconds.

Some may wonder whether this trick can mesmerize prey, but scientists don't think that's the case.

Hypnosis, defined as a mental state of increased relaxation and altered awareness, is thought to be a uniquely human psychological state. There is very little research on whether fish can be hypnotized, but a 2005 study found that pushing a steady stream of water through the snapper (Chrysophrys auratus) put them in an immobile state similar to being hypnotized. Another study looked at sedative hypnotic drugs like benzodiazepines and barbiturates and their effects on zebrafish, finding that the fish had molecular receptors for these drugs, which helped render them immobile. However, whether fish can be visually put into a state like hypnosis has yet to be directly studied.

And while some animals, such as chickens, can be induced into trance-like conditions of tonic immobility, an involuntary, temporary state of unresponsiveness that happens when humans or animals experience extreme trauma, it's unlikely that the cuttlefish's color changes "hypnotize" their prey, Connor Gibbons, the cephalopod facility manager at Columbia University told Live Science. Instead, some researchers believe that the color show serves as an ingenious disguise.

As waves of different colors ripple down the cuttlefish's body, the shape of the animal becomes less obvious to its prey, so they may not see the cuttlefish as a threat to flee from, Gibbons said.

"It's only part of something looming at them, which they're like, 'I don't know if you are a predator? Are you just passing waves? What are you?'" Gibbons said. "And then by that time, it's too late."

Once they get close enough, the cuttlefish shoots their two long, specialized feeding tentacles from small hidden pouches near the animal's mouth at their prey.

"The closest thing I can compare it to is the tongue of a chameleon extending out to grab an unsuspecting insect," Grasse said. "Cuttlefish feeding tentacles will fire out in the blink of an eye before the prey can react and escape."

Then, the prey is pulled toward the cuttlefish's mouth, pierced by its sharp, chitinous beak and injected with venom. The use of the venom helps the cuttlefish reduce their energy usage when hunting "as the cuttlefish does not want to use unnecessary energy and struggle against the prey while it's trying to eat," Grasse said.

However, the notion that cuttlefish flash colors to hide their body shape is only one idea of why cuttlefish perform these strobing color displays. Other researchers, including Grasse, describe them as a way to distract their prey.

"Essentially, they are trying their best not to alarm the prey to their presence," he said. By breaking up the size of their bodies, cuttlefish can convince their prey they're not as large or alarming as they may seem.

Whether the light shows are for disguise or distraction still needs parsing out, Gibbons said, and scientists also need a better understanding of how the cuttlefish controls its deadly dermal display. "The jury is still out on exactly what is happening," he said.

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

A fossil that sat in a museum collection for over a century is a previously unknown species of predatory dinosaur, researchers have found. The discovery could help scientists solve a longstanding mystery about how some of the Cretaceous period's most formidable hunters spread around the globe.

The dinosaur lived on what is now the Isle of Wight in southern England about 120 million years ago. It belonged to a group of two-legged carnivores called megaraptors, which are related to tyrannosaurs. But unlike tyrannousars, megaraptors are thought to have relied on their powerful arms and large curved claws to attack prey and defend themselves.

The newly identified species was described in an Oct. 14 study in the journal Royal Society Open Science. It is the first megaraptor identified in Europe, filling an important gap in the fossil record of a group whose evolutionary history remains poorly understood.

"It is a real mystery that this fossil was overlooked for so long, sitting in a drawer for nearly 100 years," study first author Cassius Morrison, a researcher in the Department of Earth Sciences at University College London (UCL) said in a statement. "Lots of bones are found on the Isle of Wight — who knows what else is waiting to be discovered."

Unconquered female warrior dinosaur

The discovery of the megaraptor began in 1924, when an amateur fossil collector discovered a dinosaur skull fragment on the Isle of Wight. The specimen eventually entered the collections of London's Natural History Museum, but it was largely forgotten.

Recently, researchers revisited the fossil as part of a study on dinosaur braincases. To identify the animal, the researchers used micro-CT scanning to examine the fossil's internal structure and build detailed 3D digital models of the space that once held the dinosaur's brain.

The researchers then compared the animal's anatomy with that of other meat-eating dinosaurs, including tyrannosaurs, spinosaurs and other theropods (the group of two-legged, mostly meat-eating dinosaurs). Several features differentiated the unknown specimen, including an almost oval opening where the spinal cord entered the skull and an unusual, hourglass-shaped ridge at the back of the braincase.

Computer-based evolutionary analyses placed the fossils within the Megaraptora family tree, supporting the idea that the skull represented a never-before-seen species. The researchers named the dinosaur Invictibellatrix amberina, combining the Latin words "unconquered" and "female warrior" for the genus name, while amberina refers to amber found in the rocks associated with the fossil.

Megaraptors lived between roughly 125 million and 66 million years ago and varied considerably in size. While early members were relatively small, some later species became enormous predators. Maip macrothorax, discovered in Argentina, may have reached up to 33 feet (10 meters) long and weighed as much as an elephant. Based on comparisons with related dinosaurs, I. amberina was much smaller, likely around 10 to 13 feet (3 to 4 m) long and standing roughly 5 feet (1.5 m) tall. The researchers estimated it weighed around 440 to 660 pounds (200 to 300 kilograms), making it one of the smallest known megaraptors.

"It was not the apex predator of its time, but for humans this dinosaur would have been more dangerous than a T. rex," Morrison said. "We would have been perfectly sized prey, about a third of their body weight. They definitely would have chased us."

Although the newly described fossil doesn't preserve the animal's arms or claws, its closest relative suggests that its claws may have measured around 4 to 8 inches (10 to 20 centimeters) long. The researchers also suggested I. amberina may have been feathered, though that feature can't be determined directly from the specimen.

A missing link in the dinosaurs' globetrotting

Scientists have long suspected that megaraptors originated in Asia before spreading to other parts of the world, eventually becoming the dominant predators across the southern supercontinent Gondwana, which included present-day Africa, South America and Antarctica. But a lack of European fossils left an important gap in verifying this migration route.

The new study's evolutionary models suggest that I. amberina descended from Asian megaraptors that dispersed into Europe around 130 million years ago. From there, members of the group may have moved through what is now Africa and further into Gondwana via temporary landbridges and temporary land connections across the shallow Tethys Ocean.

"This new species is the first proof we have that megaraptorans were also present in Europe and that they reached Gondwana this way rather than island-hopping further south," study co-author Charlie Scherer, a doctoral student at UCL Earth Sciences, said in the statement.

However, the specific route these animals took over millions of years is still unknown. The researchers also cannot yet explain why megaraptors disappeared from northern areas, but changes in climate or competition with other predatory dinosaurs may have contributed. More research on other megaraptor fossils like I. amberina could help uncover more clues.

"Work like this shows the exceptional value of working with historical museum collections where there are still many discoveries to be made," study co-author Paul Barrett, a researcher of dinosaur evolution at the Natural History Museum in London, said in the statement.

Fish meal is a commercial, protein-rich product created from raw fish and their byproducts, such as the heads and bones. It tends to be made from smaller fish species, including anchovies, sardines and herring. The fish are cooked, dried and ground into a powder, and then used to feed livestock, farmed fish and pets. But it is not a straightforward market.

In this excerpt from "Every Last Fish: A Deep Dive into the World of Fishes and Fishing" (Granta Books, 2025), journalist and author Rose George looks at how vast quantities of staple fish are taken from the sea off West Africa and turned into fishmeal for farming in Europe and China, instead of ending up on the plates of people in Africa.

"Every Last Fish" was short-listed for the 2026 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.

Rose George interview: 'If you do want to be a criminal, there is no better place to do it': Diving into the dark depths of the fishing industry

Take a fish. Eat its flesh if you want, but don't scorn the rest. It can always be used, one way or another, whether you want fishmeal or face cream.

Products derived from fish turn up everywhere. Guanine, an ingredient produced from fish scales, is found in bath foam, perfume, nail products, shampoo, skincare products, and lipstick. Fishes can become gelatine, glue, and squalene. They can be in your dietary supplements or your glass of wine: isinglass, derived from dried fish air bladders, is used in wine-making.

Futuristic piscigrafts are irrelevant to most people in Senegal, but they still have to deal with the fish by-products industry, because they have to watch as fish they could eat are transformed into the most common and lucrative fish by-products and sent abroad.

Fishmeal is a sandy grubby powder that is worth billions. Minks eat it. Pigs eat it. Cattle eat it. Fishes eat it. It is also an ingredient in fertilizer and pet food. Fishmeal is part of a huge silent industry of fish by-products that used to be known as FMFO (fishmeal and fish oil) and has now been rebranded by the industry association as 'marine ingredients,' a vague term that covers a broad range of fish-derived products, most of which are never noticed.

The Food and Agriculture Organization defines fishmeal as 'the clean, ground, dried tissue of undecomposed whole fish or fish cuttings, either or both, without the extraction of part of the oil.'

American pets may also find themselves eating fish liver and glandular meal, made from dried complete fish viscera; more general fish by-products, which are 'non-rendered, clean, undecomposed portions of fish (such as, although not limited to, heads, fins, tails, ends, skin, bone and viscera)'; or condensed fish protein digest, the 'condensed enzymatic digest of clean undecomposed whole fish or fish cuttings using the enzyme hydrolysis process'.

'Undecomposed' is doing a lot of work here, a strange term because unless a fish is caught by a vessel with freezer capacity — which no artisanal fisher has — it will be decomposing for days. In theory, fishmeal is impeccably sustainable. It should be a product made from parts of fishes that would otherwise be discarded. It is because of fishmeal that the term 'reduction fisheries' was coined.

Take the meat and the prized flesh, and the rest can be reduced or diverted to other uses. That is the theory. It is not what happens in West Africa.

Each year, half a million tonnes of wild fish are caught in African waters and sent to Europe to feed animals, when they could have fed 33 million Africans instead. That number of people is more than the combined populations of Senegal, Mauritania, and The Gambia. Globally a fifth of wild fishes become fishmeal or fish oil, but 90 per cent of fishmeal fishes are suitable for human consumption.

China uses nearly half of all FMFO, but then China uses most of everything. Europe also takes and takes. Spain imports the most fish oil from Senegal, and France takes 70 per cent of Mauritania's.

In 2019, Changing Markets Foundation produced a detailed investigative report into the fishmeal industry in India, Vietnam, and The Gambia. In each country, the pattern was similar: first the foreign factories come, then they take the fish, then they pollute the environment, then the fishermen say there are no fish left.

Although noting 'a surprising lack of traceability and transparency regarding the origin and supply chain of farmed seafood products,' the foundation linked plenty of reputable European retailers to FMFO supply chains that may use West African fish. For example: Sainsbury's, ALDI, Lidl, and Marks & Spencer in the UK; Auchan, Groupe Casino, Monoprix, and Système U in France (that is a full house of big French supermarkets); all the German ALDIs; and Mercadona in Spain. Sainsbury's, Marks & Spencer, and Mercadona have said they don't use West African FMFO in their seafood products, but how will they know?

The European Union's IUU [Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated fishing] regulations, which require a catch certificate or similar to show the fish was legally caught, do not cover fishmeal. In Mauritania, some Chinese-owned fishmeal factories have their own trawler fleets. The fish bypasses human mouths and goes straight to the factory. That is one tactic. The other is to outbid.

The fish processors tell me that they cannot compete with the prices that fish factories will pay for sardinella. Fish processors get no subsidies from the government, unlike Chinese fishing companies. In The Gambia, one fishmeal factory used 40 per cent of the country's entire fish catch in one year. Black and white. White stealing from Black. The villain/victim template seems neat and unassailable.

It is true — Europeans are using fish that West Africans could eat — and yet it is not all the truth. In Senegal, The Gambia, Mauritania, local fishermen supply fishmeal factories because the factories pay better. In Senegal, a fisheries union official tells me that there are too many pirogues. They are chasing smaller and smaller fish to sell to the factories. It is unsustainable.

The website of the IFFO, which used to stand for International Fishmeal and Fish Oil Organization and now somehow is short for the Marine Ingredients Organisation, is plain. Marine ingredients 'play an essential role in global food security'.

Rubbish, said Francisco Marí of Bread for the World at the CAOPA [African Confederation of Professional Organisations of Artisanal Fisheries] workshop. 'It's just for prawns and salmon — they are not necessary foods; it's a luxury. It's not enough for us to have 10—15 per cent of fish to feed salmon and prawns. Indirectly, we are eating your fish. It's not essential for the alimentation of the US or Japan. We are taking your fish to feed a luxury product that we don't need.'

Every Last Fish: A Deep Dive into the World of Fishes and Fishing by Rose George is published by Granta

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Paleontologists in China have discovered a small Jurassic bird that was likely a land-based predator — like a carnivorous pheasant with killer claws. It had some features of birds and others of dinosaurs, suggesting that the earliest birds had a greater diversity of lifestyles than previously recognized.

Jurassic birds first emerged 150 million to 148 million years ago, and fossils of them are rare, so experts are just starting to understand how early birds diversified and evolved the ability to fly.

The researchers discovered the newly identified Yuezhuornis yangyuanensis in 2024, in the fossil assemblage known as the Upper Jurassic Zhenghe Fauna in southeastern China. It lived 150 million to 148 million years ago, roughly when birds started to appear in the fossil record. The team published their findings Wednesday (Oct. 14) in the journal Nature.

Analysis of the fossilized skeleton revealed the animal was small and weighed about 1.8 pounds (0.8  kilograms). "It was probably as large as a crow," Min Wang, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Live Science via email.

Y. yangyuanensis had a mix of features seen in birds and predatory Deinonychosauria dinosaurs, such as Velociraptor, which are known for their sickle-shaped toe claws. It had deinonychosaur-like hyperextensible toes, with forelimbs that were roughly one-third shorter than its hind limbs. This is odd because modern birds and many other Jurassic paravians — the group that includes bird-like dinosaurs, including the ancestors of birds as well as modern birds themselves — have long forelimbs, linked to giving wings more lift force for taking off.

Y. yangyuanensis also had slender cranial elements and sparsely spaced teeth. These features, alongside the curved claw-like toes that were capable of securing prey, suggest that the animal's diet included meat.

"Its key anatomical features are the combination of dinosaurs' and birds' features: for instance, its teeth, pectoral gird, and especially the hyperextensible, 'sickle-clawed' second pedal digit are similar to that of dinosaurs," Wang said. Meanwhile, he said its slender cranial bones and bird-like pelvis are comparable to early birds.

This combination of features suggests that "the morphological gap between birds and dinosaurs is much smaller than we thought," he added.

Comparisons with 377 living bird species showed that the limb proportions of Y. yangyuanensis were most similar to those of terrestrial birds.

Wang suggested that Y. yangyuanensis was a flightless bird, but not one specialized to live in trees or wade in the swamps in the region. It was a small carnivore, with similar proportions to a pheasant, that was well adapted for running. "I think there are no directly comparable modern birds," he said.

The mosaic of features hints that Y. yangyuanensis may have occupied an ecological niche that was rarely utilized by early birds, and that there wasn't a systematic progression toward flight optimization, Wang said.

Despite being flightless, Wang and his colleagues place Y. yangyuanensis closer in the evolutionary tree to modern birds than to Archaeopteryx, one of the world's first proto birds, which lived about 150 million years ago and is thought to have been able to fly.

This adds to evidence that "the ability to fly arose not once, but several times among disparate groups of carnivorous dinosaurs that are closely related to birds," wrote Fernando Novas, a paleontologist at the Felix de Azara Natural History Foundation in Buenos Aires, Argentina, who wasn’t involved in the study, in an accompanying article in Nature. This includes flight evolving in early birds and in scansoriopterygid dinosaurs, which had membranous folds like the wings of bats, and the four-winged microraptors. Y. yangyuanensis seems to have taken a different road, eschewing the flying ways of its relatives.

"It highlights the extraordinary breadth of ecological and morphological diversification that took place close to the origins of avialans," Wang said.

Since June, more than 300 southern right whale (Eubalaena australis) calves have died in Argentine Patagonia, in what scientists describe as an "exceptional" die-off. The preliminary figure already far exceeds the previous annual record set in 2012, when 113 southern right whale calves died — the highest number ever documented for the species, both locally and globally.

Now, scientists are racing to figure out exactly what's causing the record-breaking die-off.

Laboratory analyses of specimens that died this year tested positive for the pathogenic bacterium Erysipelothrix rhusiopathiae, environmental authorities in Chubut province told Live Science. E. rhusiopathiae was first identified in southern right whale calves in 2013, but scientists don't know what might have changed this year to cause an infection-driven die-off of this magnitude.

Researchers say they need to quickly find the answer to better understand the changing threat this species faces, the risk to the wider ecosystem and humans, and what can be done to manage it.

"The battle between living organisms and pathogens is constant," said Carla Fiorito, a researcher at the Center for the Study of Marine Systems (CESIMAR) who previously identified the bacterium in right whales. "But for this to happen now, there must have been a shift in the balance between the agent, the host, and the environment," she told Live Science.

Record-breaking number

The first dead calves appeared on the beaches of Península Valdés in June, at the start of the breeding season, which runs through to December. Península Valdés is located in Chubut province, on the coast of northern Patagonia.

In a typical year, calf mortality reaches 20% to 30% of a cohort from various causes, including infections. But this year's losses have already far surpassed that.

In September, 409 calves were counted among a total of 1,375 southern right whales during a survey conducted by CESIMAR's Marine Mammal Laboratory. With more than 300 deaths already recorded, the die-off represents an exceptional proportion of these calves. The final figure will be released by the Southern Right Whale Health Monitoring Program in December.

Scientists have responded by expediting routine research to determine what's different this year to previous years.

"Samples were sent for analysis earlier than usual — typically, they are analyzed at the end of the year — because the higher-than-usual mortality is a cause for concern," said Víctor Fratto, the director of the Native Wildlife Rescue Program and a contributor with the whale monitoring program. "What those samples are showing is that the calves died from erysipelas," he told Live Science.

A known bacterium full of unknowns

Erysipelas is a bacterial infection that affects the skin. In its most severe form, it can spread through the bloodstream and cause a systemic infection, damaging vital organs and sometimes leading to death. Animals that catch the disease, for example through a wound, may develop characteristic skin lesions, which are rhomboid or rectangular in shape, caused by alterations in the blood vessels.

The bacterium that causes erysipelas, E. rhusiopathiae, is not exclusive to whales. It can be found in marine environments and in a wide variety of animals, including fish, crustaceans and birds. Pigs are one of its natural reservoirs.

"It is a ubiquitous and opportunistic bacterium," Fiorito said. (The human illness of the same name is different and caused by Group A streptococcal bacteria, although humans can also catch the E. rhusiopathiae form of the illness.)

The presence of E. rhusiopathiae does not necessarily mean an animal is diseased. Yet many questions remain about E. rhusiopathiae in whales.

"We don't know much about the bacterium itself; we don't know which serotypes are present in the whales, or how common it is in healthy animals or other species," Fiorito said. "There is also no data on the environment."

Calves are especially vulnerable because their immune systems are still developing and they spend more time at the surface than adults do, exposing them to more attacks by gulls, which can transfer the disease.

"The working hypothesis is that the gull is the vector: Pecking causes wounds on the back, allowing the bacteria to enter," Fratto said. "The bacteria might already be present on the skin, or they could be carried on the beak of a gull that had previously pecked another whale suffering from erysipelas."

The potential role of gulls

Attacks by kelp gulls (Larus dominicanus) on southern right whales were first recorded at Península Valdés in the 1970s. The behavior began with just a few individuals in Patagonia's San José Gulf and became increasingly frequent over time, Ricardo Bastida, a marine biologist and professor emeritus at the National University of Mar del Plata who has studied these cetaceans for more than four decades, told Live Science. The birds also began scavenging the carcasses of stranded whales, Bastida said

Gull populations have grown and new breeding colonies have emerged in the region thanks to increased food availability linked to fishing activities and discarded catch, he noted. However, the attacks alone do not explain the 2026 mortality event: They have been occurring for decades, and gulls are a regular part of the ecosystem.

Fratto said that swabs will be taken from gulls to check for the presence of E. rhusiopathiae and assess whether the results could help develop a management strategy for the species.

Diego Rodríguez, a marine biologist at the National University of Mar del Plata, said that research must go beyond the dead calves and examine the ecosystem's fauna to determine where the bacterium is present and how it might be circulating. "It is far more likely that [the die-off event] is linked to cross-infection," Rodríguez told Live Science.

What changed this year?

The major question for scientists is what might have changed this year to cause a bacterium already present in the ecosystem to trigger a die-off of this magnitude. Experts told Live Science they believe the phenomenon could be the result of several factors acting simultaneously.

"The bacterium was present, but this year it resulted in a widespread infection, making this event unusual," Mariano Coscarella, a researcher at the Marine Mammal Laboratory at CESIMAR, told Live Science. "It is a major step forward to have a fairly clear idea of what caused the disease, but we do not know what changed."

One factor could be the environment. Changes in water temperature, salinity, pH or rainfall could alter the conditions under which infection occurs. There could also be changes in food availability, affecting the mothers' body condition and the vulnerability of their calves. Another possibility is that the pathogen itself has changed — for instance, through the emergence or increased circulation of a more virulent strain or a different serotype, Fiorito said.

The El Niño phenomenon could also play a role by altering oceanographic conditions and food availability, although the researchers said there's insufficient evidence to link it to the die-off.

It is too early to determine what impact this die-off will have on the southern right whale population. Rodríguez suggested that losing such a large proportion of a season's calves could have demographic consequences. "It is very risky to predict what will happen in the future at this stage, but clearly, this year's cohort of live-born calves will essentially be absent from the adult records of future populations," he said.

Coscarella is more cautious. Southern right whales are extremely long-lived, and calves represent only a fraction of the population. Therefore, a single season of exceptionally high mortality does not necessarily mean the population will go into decline, he argued. "What would be concerning is if there were two, three or four episodes like this," he noted.

The event also has public health implications. Fiorito pointed out that erysipelas can infect humans, usually through skin wounds. The whales' carcasses could also pose a risk of exposure to anyone coming into contact with them, as could seawater for people swimming in the area.

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For decades, photojournalist Steve Winter has traveled across the world capturing incredible images of big cats as part of his work for National Geographic. Yet he didn't photograph an animal professionally until he was 34.

"If anybody had said, 'You're going to work with big cats for 25 years of your career,' I would have said 'No, I don't know anything about big cats,'" he told Live Science. "But I learned from scientists and local people," he added. "That was very, very important — that's what, to me, was the biggest change in my life."

Together with his wife, author and environmental journalist Sharon Guynup, Winter has helped change laws around big cats in the U.S.; revealed the horrors of the Tiger Temple in Bangkok, resulting in its closure; and took an iconic photograph of the cougar P-22 beneath the Hollywood sign, which eventually led to the creation of the world's largest highway wildlife corridor over Highway 101 in California.

In their new book, "Big Cats" (National Geographic Books, 2026), Winter and Guynup provide a retrospective of their careers, looking at the fragility of these predators, the conservation work helping to save them, and the challenges they still face. Live Science spoke with Winter about his career, the changes he's seen, and why he's hopeful for the future.

Hannah Osborne: You've traveled all over the world and seen so many things. Is there one photograph that really sticks out for you, one that you come back to and think about?

Steve Winter: I always look at the images that have had an impact at the time. That makes a huge difference to me, because in the end, I know that in taking this [photograph], not only did I succeed beyond my wildest expectations, but it's making a difference in the world. Right now, I have just been putting remote cameras up on what will be the world's largest wildlife overpass, and that was started by my Hollywood cougar picture of P-22, Puma 22, under the Hollywood sign. [Editor's note: The common names cougar, puma and mountain lion all refer to the same species, Puma concolor.]

That changed so much in Los Angeles. I've never seen a city be transformed in their love for the fact that they have a mountain lion in a park in the city. What came of that was [people] thinking, "Hey, maybe we should connect these areas where these animals are living." [Editor's note: The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over the 10-lane Highway 101 that was inspired by the cougar P-22 is due to open Dec. 2.]

To think about that is pretty amazing, so right now, P-22 and the Hollywood cougar is my go-to image.

He became a celebrity in the land of celebrities; people loved him. There's a P-22 day; schools are using urban wildlife in their curriculum. The LA Natural History Museum has a permanent exhibit, and what is right in the center of it? The Hollywood cougar picture.

HO: How did the P-22 photograph come about?

SW: As wildlife photographers, we will often go to these meetings where people are gathering to save elephants, to save this, to save that. So I went to meet the scientists that worked with these cats in the largest urban park in the United States. I asked Jeff Sikich, a biologist for the National Park Service, "[Do] you have a lot of trails in that park? Do you have any that the cats walk on where you could see the lights of LA in the background?" He kept saying no.

When you're working with camera traps, it's very important to visualize the picture in your mind that you're after [when] you visit a spot. I just said, "Well, Jeff, you know what would really tell the story of urban wildlife is if we had a mountain lion under the Hollywood sign." He looked at me like I'm crazy, and said, "There's no mountain lions in Griffith Park." I said, "If anything changes, let me know."

Eight months later, I got a text. They had a trail camp set up to census bobcats [Lynx rufus] in the park, and there was P-22.

With camera traps, you don't need to sit, and I learned that from the beginning. For the second story I did, it was photographing a quetzal, which is a sacred bird of the Maya and the Aztecs. I knew nothing about birds, either. It's got a meter-long [3 feet] tail. I was enamored by the fact that it had a historical background — they used quetzal feathers as a form of currency; they were sacred birds.

I loved all that, but working on that story in a cloud forest in Guatemala on top of a mountain all by myself, every morning I'd come down and set my camera up on the tripod [near the bird's nest], and then take it away at the end of the day. I'd walk back, and all of a sudden, the hair on the back of my head would stand up and on my arm, and I'd get this tingling feeling and it's like, what's going on? I'd turn around. You can't see anything in a rainforest or a cloud forest because the proliferation of life is everywhere. One night when I'm reading my book in the one room shack that I was staying in my bunk bed, all I hear is the stairs creaking. Then I hear the floorboards creaking. Then I hear scratching, and then sniffing, outside the door.

I grabbed the walkie-talkie to call Juan Carlos, the naturalist that I was working with. He would find the quetzal nests for me. I asked him, in Spanish, "Juan Carlos, what is this?"

And he said, "Oh, Steve, don't worry; it's just a black panther [Panthera onca]." I've been there five weeks, and I said, "Well, how come it took you so long to tell me there was a black jaguar here?" And he said, "We didn't want to worry you."

HO: Throughout the book, you look at topics like poaching, captive tigers in the Tiger Temple in Thailand, and the way they're kept in the U.S. for entertainment. And a lot of these things are still going on. How do you cope with seeing that side of their lives?

SW: When I was first working on tigers, I was in Thailand. I was wanting to work in Thailand and Sumatra because they were the two subspecies that experts said may go extinct. I was working with the most incredible group of scientists I've probably ever worked with. They were trying to save the Indo-Chinese tiger [Panthera tigris corbetti] in Thailand.

But close by was this place called the Thai Tiger Temple. And I said, "Hey, guys; I'd like to go there." And they said, "No, Steve; don't go. These are bad people, and we think they're involved in the black-market trade of tiger parts and tigers to Laos and then into China."

That's a good reason for me to go if you don't want me to go. The first thing I saw was this huge sign that said "conservation." This was a Buddhist monastery. For some reason, the abbot had been given a tiger cub about 10 years before, and he fell in love with tigers. So they started a tiger tourism operation that brought in at least $3 million a year.

I could see something was fishy right away, because by then, I'd learned a lot about these cats. They kept saying that they always had 150 tigers. But you could pet tiger cubs for Instagram selfies or bottle-feed them 365 days a year. If you're breeding tigers, what are you going to have? More tigers. Something was happening to them, because the death rate wouldn't take over the birth rate when you're speed-breeding cubs, which is what they were doing. A female has cubs; they take them away immediately so she'll be ready to have another litter. You can only use the cubs for three months because after that, they're too big to pet.

They had all these tourist things where you could get a selfie with a head of a tiger in your lap. I was saying, "Why are these tigers acting so sleepy?" They're taking this giant head of a tiger and putting it in somebody's lap that's sitting on the concrete. You would think that if you put the head of a tiger in your lap, you're going to end up with your head in their mouth.

[Editor's note: Winter and Guynup worked together on an investigation into the Tiger Temple in 2016, which eventually led to it being exposed for its abuse and connections with the illegal wildlife trade. Shortly after, the Tiger Temple was shut to the public.]

Sharon did the investigation, and I already had pictures. But we went to do a video and go visit the temple again … By the time we got done, the TV stations in Bangkok had taken the video and showed it all over on the nightly news. We kept working on this, and Sharon wrote four more stories. And after the last one, the Thai government was inundated with people calling for the prime minister to shut it down. They went in with the army and the police, and what they found was horrific. They went to the freezer. There were tigers hanging on meat hooks, cubs in jars, with a little Thai flag on them. They shut it down.

Stopping this is really important. After that, we did a story on tigers in the U.S., which was very difficult psychologically. It was one thing to see them in Thailand, but we had always heard that there were more tigers in the United States than there are in the wild, and people would go, "What are you talking about? We don't have tigers here."

Sharon and I … we found a lot of the same speed-breeding cubs at these roadside zoos, whether it was Doc Antle's Myrtle Beach that was $500 a day, or some dumpy little place on the road down south where you can give them $10 to look at a tiger. They were everywhere.

After that story came out, the National Geographic Society gave a copy of this 30-page story that we had done for the magazine to every member of Congress. We got this text on 20th December, 2022, that President Biden had signed the Big Cat Public Safety Act, which outlawed all that. We were part of getting this law passed, which was incredible.

HO: What are some of the biggest changes in conservation you've seen over your career?

SW: Conservation was changing a lot in the '90s and 2000s. Alan Rabinowitz [a zoologist who served as the president, CEO and chief scientist at Panthera Corp., a nonprofit conservation organization devoted to protecting wild cats] had this idea after he had a lot of scientists in Central and South America give him data on where they were working and where jaguars were. When he took it away and just showed the locations, he goes, this is a corridor, a natural corridor, because now we're talking a lot about connectivity and how roads get in the way. It's like animals are in prison because they can't cross these big freeways or even small ones. Find out where animals are, their migrating paths, and put in an overpass or an underpass or something.

All this was happening, all this new science, new conservation. That was all spearheaded by the work of [biologist and conservationist] George Schaller, who became a friend of ours. What a life that we've had — and are having. We're still working on the connectivity part right now.

HO: Are you hopeful for the big cats in LA?

SW: Oh, definitely. The ones that live in the Santa Monica National Recreation Area will be able to cross the 101 and then go all the way to San Jose. They could actually then hug the top of a certain mountain and get close to San Francisco, which is incredible to think about now. It's a huge metropolitan area, so you're leaving one, going to another. But there's so much land in between, and they can cross safely.

HO: What made you specialize in big cats in the first place, and what's the draw that keeps you coming back?

SW: Big cats are so charismatic and, to me, mystical. And they're an umbrella species, so if you save the largest predator, which is usually a big cat in any landscape, you save everything underneath it.

I was just taken over by these animals. National Geographic had never done a jaguar story before. I found out really quick why: You can't see them. I tried to use remote cameras, camera traps, but they're really smart. They'll go around them, so they don't have the flash going off or they don't like the sound or the smell of meat on these waterproof boxes and the cords and all that.

I just fell in love with big cats, and what a life to be able to work with every one of them. The only one that was on my list that I haven't done is the Amur tiger, Siberian tiger [Panthera tigris altaica]. When I was ready to photograph them with the scientists that had been monitoring them for over a decade, [the tigers] got canine distemper and about 60% died.

Big cats really bounce back when you give them protection, and there was protection given after you lose this many. All the study tigers that had the GPS collars on, the ones they could monitor, died. But the population bounced back, and there's more now than there were before.

I won't get to photograph Amur tigers. And the reason is, there's people — locals — who are working on it, and they're doing an incredible job. I've got a book here that has all the cats that I've worked on. The impact these stories have had, and the change that's come about, is what really makes me proud.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

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Great Danes and mastiffs rarely live more than a decade, while Chihuahuas can live twice as long. Exactly why big dogs die younger than small ones do has been unclear — but new findings may help to solve that mystery.

The research, published Thursday (Oct. 8) in the journal Science, looked at a chemical code written on top of dogs' DNA. This code, called the methylome, consists of chemical tags called methyl groups, which bind to DNA's building blocks.

Proteins constantly access DNA, loading up the information written in its code and taking that data away to be turned into new proteins for the cell. But these methyl groups can act as tiny roadblocks that stop that process in its tracks.

These groups are one type of "epigenetic marker," which collectively help to control gene activity, and their arrangement on DNA changes predictably as animals age, study co-author Blaise Mariner, a bioinformatician at Arizona State University, told Live Science. Across many studies and species, including humans, scientists have used this data to build epigenetic clocks that track animals' biological ages.

Dogs happen to be a great species for studying aging. Their owners devotedly track what they eat, how they live, and how their health changes over time. So Mariner and his colleagues built epigenetic clocks using DNA in blood samples taken from 894 dogs enrolled in the long-term Dog Aging Project based at the University of Washington.

These samples revealed how the dogs' immune cells aged. These cells patrol the whole body, so "they're a really good measure of systemic aging," study co-author Noah Snyder-Mackler, a genomicist at Arizona State University, told Live Science.

The team found that changes in DNA methylation closely tracked biological aging, in that the dogs with older-than-expected epigenetic ages had a higher risk of death from any cause. Once they looked at how different sizes of dogs aged, clear differences emerged.

"Using our biomarker, this epigenetic clock, big dogs were aging a little bit faster per year of life than small dogs," Snyder-Mackler said.

A key epigenetic change linked to larger body size was the loss of methyl groups at stretches of DNA called transposable elements. Also called "jumping genes," these elements can potentially move around the genome, but the methyl groups help stop them from doing so. But when that methylation is lost, the jumping genes can become too active and end up damaging other genes and causing inflammation, a key process that ramps up with age.

In short, the new data suggests that out-of-control jumping genes may contribute to big dogs' faster aging.

In aging dogs, the team found that some regions of the genome with few chemical tags became more methylated, while other areas that had been choked with methyl groups gradually lost them. Additionally, at least in terms of their epigenetics, dogs' immune cells appear to become more similar to one another as they age. Mariner said this "loss of cell identity" is a key hypothesis for what happens to the body as it ages.

Immune cells are carefully specialized for different roles, such as preventing cancer or killing viruses. As these cells become more similar to one another, they become less able to fulfill their specialized roles, studies suggest.

Humans have bred big dogs for size, and Snyder-Mackler said this push for large body size may have come at a cost.

"Their bodies have to make this trade-off between really rapid growth and maintenance of that," he said, "versus investment in the immune system and integrity of the organism." For now, that idea is a hypothesis, though, as the current study doesn't directly address why big dogs' epigenetic aging has come to be this way.

Now, the team wants to build more informative clocks as the Dog Aging Project recruits more pooches to follow for longer periods. Snyder-Mackler said the team's data currently explains only part of how dogs' epigenetic ages vary. "What we really want to know is, what explains the rest of that variation?" he said.

The team was keen to build predictive models that might help dog owners anticipate their pets' age-related health concerns, Snyder-Mackler added.

What we learn about dogs from these studies may help us understand human aging, too. That's partly because dogs get some of the same diseases we do, but it's chiefly because they share humans' living spaces and environments.

"We're going to start looking, at the molecular level, [at] how these environmental exposures or experiences impact health and aging in dogs, which is going to be directly translatable to humans who are living in those same exact environments," Snyder-Mackler said.

"Most people love dogs," he added. "That means we can get a lot of really good data on them."

The remote south Atlantic island of St. Helena boasts an international celebrity: the tortoise Jonathan, the oldest living land animal. At 194 years old, he has outlasted the expected lifespan for an Aldabra giant tortoise (Aldabrachelys gigantea) by about a century. Now, scientists have identified a range of unique genetic and epigenetic traits that may hold the key to this longevity.

The new research zoomed in on Jonathan's genes, as well as the chemical tags that sit on top of DNA molecules, known as "epigenetic markers." These markers help control which genes are activated and to what degree. The analysis finds that Jonathan's genes associated with mitochondrial function are in great shape, epigenetically speaking, which suggests that they've played a big role in the tortoise's success.

While mitochondrial function has long been linked to longevity and mitochondrial dysfunction has been tied to disease, Jonathan offers fresh insight into that dynamic, said study co-author Stephen Clark, chief scientist of the Kallel Foundation, a nonprofit in Nashville researching drug targets to promote human longevity.

Clark and colleagues published their findings Wednesday (Oct. 7) in the journal Science Advances.

Decoding Jonathan's secrets to long life

Nearly a decade ago, the researchers enlisted Joe Hollins, the vet tasked with Jonathan's care, to collect samples from the record-setting animal. Island authorities forbade the vet from drawing the tortoise's blood, fearing the risk of an infection.

"I didn't want to be the doctor that killed Jonathan," Clark told Live Science. Hollins collected samples via cheek swab instead.

When the samples arrived in the U.S., the researchers sequenced them, but when their computers kept crashing, they discovered that the DNA had been isolated from bacteria in Jonathan's mouth rather than the tortoise's own cells.

Clark "had to go back and beg" for permission to collect more data, he said. The vet then sent cheek scrape samples, which are collected with a slightly different tool than cheek swabs. This time, the DNA was in fact from Jonathan.

The DNA isolated from those cheek tissue samples was more fragmented than it would have been in a blood sample, so the researchers filled in the gaps using an existing reference genome from a 36-year-old Aldabra tortoise named Tank. They also compared Jonathan's DNA to that of a Galápagos tortoise (Chelonoidis abingdoni) named Lonesome George, who was believed to be over 100 years old at the time of his death in 2012.

The team found that, compared to Tank and Lonesome George, Jonathan carried 287 unique variants of genes that had previously been linked to aging-related pathways. These included genes involved in DNA repair and the function of telomeres — the protective tips at the end of chromosomes that tend to shorten with age.

These pathways are also related to aging processes in humans, highlighting a "broader signature of aging" across species, Greer Dolby, an assistant professor of biology at The University of Alabama at Birmingham, who was not involved with the study, told Live Science.

The researchers also looked at epigenetic changes, including DNA methylation, which is when a chemical tag called a methyl group binds the DNA. Certain patterns of DNA methylation can function as a "clock" in that they reflect an organism's biological age; scientists have recently harnessed these patterns in the study of human aging. In this case, the team compared the DNA methylation across Jonathan's genome to that of young and old Aldabra tortoises.

The methylation patterns were more disordered in the older tortoises, reflecting random changes acquired over time, the researchers found. Scientists call this phenomenon "methylation entropy." For most genes, Jonathan's DNA methylation patterns were more disordered than those of the young tortoises. But in a suite of genes tied to mitochondrial function — specifically the bits of those genes that switch them "on" — Jonathan had more organized methylation patterns. That might keep expression of these genes consistent over time, the researchers theorized.

Mitochondria produce energy that cells need to function properly, repair themselves and reduce further damage to DNA. "Keeping the entropy low in these mitochondrial genes, or keeping pristine mitochondria, is likely to be a contributor to longevity," Clark said.

However, the authors couldn't determine a causal relationship — they didn't run any tests that could definitively prove that Jonathon's lack of entropy in these genes explains his long life. Clark argued that additional experiments on a blood sample from Jonathan could offer a more comprehensive view of his genome.

Jonathan's full genetic profile can't be known until after the tortoise's death, when researchers can collect DNA from more tissues, said Vincent Lynch, a professor of biology at the University at Buffalo, who was not involved with the study.

"Some organs are more susceptible to different diseases of old age than other ones, and that happens because mutations accumulate over time," he told Live Science. "We would ideally like to know what those mutations are in those specific tissues."

Furthermore, Lynch questioned whether entropy was a useful characterization of age-related DNA methylation patterns, as methylation can be unpredictable. That said, he agreed that the genes flagged in the study offer helpful data for future work on longevity.

More experiments are needed to determine whether these mitochondrial genes actually play a role in longevity across all Aldabra tortoises, let alone in other animals, or if Jonathan is just an outlier.

"Maybe Jonathan is just really good at being old," Lynch said.

A newly discovered platypus-like creature is the largest-known mammal relative from the entire Jurassic period, a new study finds — although it still only weighed as much as a Chihuahua.

The critter, which hunted salamanders in the freshwater lakes and rivers of what is now Inner Mongolia, China, lived during the mid-Jurassic between 168 million and 163 million years ago. It seems to be the earliest known mammal-type animal that lived a semiaquatic life.

Researchers unearthed the delicate and detailed fossil in 2016, which revealed that the animal likely weighed about 2.2 to 4.4 pounds (1 to 2 kilograms). It was large for a mammal relative during the Jurassic, but its name, Megacauda sungei, was inspired by its tail: Megacauda means "big tail." The discovery was detailed in a study published on Wednesday (Oct. 7) in the journal Nature.

The furry predator had a mix of features seen in modern-day animals, with a broad, flattened tail that marks it as a powerful swimmer, and short hind legs with relatively long feet.

"It's like a chimera," study co-author Zhe-Xi Luo, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago, told Live Science. "The back half of this animal is very much like a platypus. As are the limbs, which would be capable of swimming or digging tunnels in river banks."

But the teeth "are definitely not like a platypus," Luo said. It possessed robust canines and shearing cheek-teeth that would cut and chew meat in a different way from modern carnivorous mammals. "It's a predator with gigantic and very specialized canines," Luo said. "So, it's partly otter-like and partly platypus-like."

A revealing fossil

Tiny bits of vertebrate bones found in what would have been the animal's stomach and the surrounding fossil beds hint that M. sungei dined on salamanders, Luo said.

He added that M. sungei may have sheltered in burrows on land in the temperate plant-filled climate, and hunted in lakes and rivers for fish and invertebrates.

Another notable aspect of the fossil is its throat. Modern mammals, including humans, have hyoid bones in the throat arranged in a "U"-shaped saddle. These help us use throat muscles to swallow chewed food one chunk at a time, instead of gulping down huge bites or whole prey. The structures also enable babies to suckle their mother's milk.

M. sungei seems to have had the apparatus needed to do this, study co-author Thomas Martin, a paleontologist at the University of Bonn in Germany, told Live Science.

"This is an incredibly important evolutionary innovation," Luo said, adding that this capability is one of the things that helped early mammals diversify into carnivores, insectivores, herbivores or omnivores to take advantage of all sorts of foods.

Finding this in M. sungei suggests that the apparatus needed for suckling milk and swallowing had already evolved by the Middle Jurassic (around 174 million to 164 million years ago), Martin said.

This is before marsupials like kangaroos and placental mammals like primates and bears are thought to have diverged from each other 160 million years ago, after descending from an egg-laying common ancestor that lived approximately 180 million years ago.

"Now we push the history of it back to before the split of modern marsupials and modern eutherian [placental] mammals," Luo said.

"Neonatal suckling behaviour was previously thought of as being a hallmark of advanced mammals, but it now appears to have evolved well before then, in the common ancestor of docodontans and mammals at least 165 million years ago," said Sue Hand, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia who wasn’t involved in the study.

M. sungei is from an extinct lineage of docodonts, which are relatives of mammals from the dinosaur-dominated Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, living between about 200 million and 120 million years ago.

Docodonts adapted to a wide variety of habitats. For example, there was the Jurassic tree-dwelling shrew-like docodont called Microdocodon gracilis, and Docofossor brachydactylus, a tunnel-digger with shovel-like paws. Luo was also part of the team that described a semiaquatic "Jurassic beaver", Castorocauda lutrasimilis, which lived 164 million years ago.

"It seems that an aquatic lifestyle arose often in early mammal-like species," said Tim Flannery, a mammalogist at the Australian Museum Research institute who wasn't involved in the work.

If anything, the newly described "spectacular fossil" shows that docodonts were wide-ranging during the dinosaur age, Hand told Live Science in an email.

"This very detailed study adds to accumulating evidence that mammaliaforms occupied a wide range of ecological niches long before the evolution of living mammals," Hand said.

Have you ever wondered what it's like to be flipped off by an orangutan or seduced by a mantis? Well, wonder no more, thanks to the 2026 Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards.

This photography competition showcases the amusing side of nature, usually by anthropomorphizing it in some way, and features a variety of comical critters from across the globe.

This year, a surprised owl and a brown bear striking a pose are featured among the more than 10,000 entries, with photographers competing for a luxury safari in Kenya's Maasai Mara National Reserve.

Live Science rounded up some of the funniest photos from the 2026 finalists for your enjoyment. And yes, the orangutan and mantis have made it to the finals.

"Are You Kidding Me?"

Here we see a squirrel launching itself at a great horned owl fledgling in Natural Bridges State Beach park in Santa Cruz, California. According to photographer Kevin Lohman, the squirrel knocked the owl off its perch three times.

Our video channels editor, Elise Poore, said this photo really made her laugh. I doubt the owl found it quite so funny. However, great horned owls (Bubo virginianus) do hunt squirrels, so it's no surprise that these rodents can get a little tetchy around the birds.

"Spicy Orangutan"

This "Spicy Orangutan" entry features a male Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) raising one finger, giving the appearance that he's flipping off the camera. In the description accompanying the image, photographer Tanner Mansell explained that the orangutan was finishing his meal at the time.

"Even though he was completely wild and just enjoying his food, I couldn't help wondering, 'Does he know what he's doing?'" Mansell wrote.

No, Mansell, he doesn't.

"Ballet Dancer"

This photo of a sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus) in Dumfries, Scotland, is titled "Ballet Dancer," but to me, the balancing bird looks more like an Olympic gymnast in the middle of a complex beam routine. Either way, perfect form!

"Push Over"

This lion snapshot, taken in the Ruckomechi riverbed in Zimbabwe, is one of many finalists that appear to show animals laughing or joking around.

"#ForTheGram"

Photographer Rosie Barrett was getting shots of three yearling brown bears (Ursus arctos) in Finland when one appeared to strike a pose.

"Pretty sure he knew it was for Instagram..un-bear-lieavable!" Barrett wrote in a description of her photo.

S-bear me.

"Sexy Mantis"

I know what you're thinking: This mantis looks like it's saying, "Draw me like one of your French girls." However, if you can look past the sexualization of an insect, you might notice a pretty neat trick in how the photo was framed.

Half of the mantis's body is hidden behind the leaf. What appears to be a torso and legs are actually the creature's forelimbs, which it uses to catch prey. Photographer Diego Perez explained that he snapped the mantis while documenting wildlife in the proposed Bosques del Araza Regional Conservation Area in Peru, which is currently threatened by illegal gold mining.

"Sea Gangsters"

Here we see a herd of walruses on the coast of Svalbard in Norway. The photo is titled "Sea Gangsters," implying that the walruses look like tough guys. You'd probably feel tough, too, if your tusks (which are actually sabers) grew to around 3 feet (1 meter) long.

"Little Godzilla"

Ten out of 10. No notes. But, in all seriousness, red squirrels (Sciurus vulgaris) are known to grab materials like dried grass and moss to line their nests, called dreys, so maybe this little fellow is working on its home sweet home.

"The Different One"

Sometimes, all a photographer needs is the Maasai Mara, three young giraffes and a perfectly placed acacia tree. It's nice that the photographer caught them at a standstill, since these ungulates can run up to 35 mph (56 km/h) in short bursts.

This is just a selection of the finalists. You can see the rest of the contenders in Nikon's 2026 finalists gallery. The winners will be announced Dec. 8.

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

In 2023, an African gray parrot named Jack went viral for mimicking the coughs and wheezes of her owner's father, who often struggled to breathe from severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

But it wasn't just the imitation that made Jack famous; it was also that she seemed to relish the suffering of a man she purportedly hated. In the video, Jack's owner even claimed that she had a favorite cough.

The parrot appeared to be experiencing a complex emotion that in humans is known as schadenfreude, or pleasure at seeing another's pain. Literally translated from German as "harm joy," it's a feeling that might emerge when a rival coworker gets fired, or when a rude neighbor has their package stolen.

When a cat seems a little too happy watching a human stub their toe, or a horse seems to grin at a person stepping in poop, their owners might also interpret their behavior as schadenfreude.

But can any animals really experience such a complicated emotion? Or is this a classic case of anthropomorphization?

A complex emotion

Animals probably do not experience schadenfreude, according to researchers who study animal behavior and intelligence. However, the question hasn't received much attention in formal research. That's partly due to limitations of animal behavior methodology, but also because the question is bound up with how we define and communicate emotion in the first place.

"The study of complex emotions is incredibly difficult when you're talking about an animal that cannot communicate their emotions linguistically," Zachary Silver, an assistant professor of psychology who leads the canine intelligence lab at Occidental College in Los Angeles, told Live Science. "We don't have the ability to be as precise as we like to be in the scientific community."

Silver explained that researchers can look at behavior, neurological signals or hormonal activity to make an educated guess about what an animal might be feeling. A dog that has its ears back and tail tucked, for instance, is probably experiencing a negative emotion, while one wagging its tail is feeling a positive one.

But "aside from positive and negative, without words to describe the emotion, it becomes very difficult to disentangle," Silver said. The dog could be happy, but it could also just be interested in something new. "It's just so hard for us to say with any definitive nature that we really can know exactly what emotion is going on there," Silver said.

Animal behavior researchers try to avoid anthropomorphizing animals ‪(attributing human qualities to them) without evidence. When a cat or dog comforts a grieving human, for example, it could just be that the behavior was previously reinforced by rewarding the animal with treats or pets, rather than a genuine outpouring of sympathy. Similarly, Jack the parrot could have been mimicking coughs just for attention.

To truly experience a complicated emotion like schadenfreude, an animal needs to understand the emotional states of both itself and others — a concept called theory of mind.

"Dogs may have some ability to attribute mental states like emotions, thoughts, beliefs, intentions to other individuals, but this really only occurs in very select contexts and in really kind of a rudimentary way," Silver said. Because of this, "it's exceedingly unlikely that dogs would be able to experience schadenfreude in the way that we as humans do."

David Stahlman, an animal behavior researcher at the University of Mary Washington, agreed that such emotional capacity in animals is unlikely. He said that animals do not seem to have the ability to recognize their own emotional states, though he noted that not all animal behavior researchers agree.

"There's a difference between the affect, the emotional behavior, and then the recognition of the emotional behavior in oneself," Stahlman said. If nonhuman animals were to have this capability, he suspected it would probably be found in highly social great apes, like chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus). Schadenfreude, in particular, would require animals to live in close social groups, since it requires knowledge of the individual experiencing the harm and whether it's deserved.

In hierarchical groups, it's possible that the suffering of one animal might benefit another and lead to something resembling happiness, Stahlman said, but he doubts this would ever qualify as true schadenfreude.

"The kind of Machiavellian stuff is a very human thing," he said.

Nevertheless, “there is a lot of data pointing in the direction that animals do have really deep capacities for emotional intelligence,” said Kaeli Swift, an animal behavior researcher at the University of Washington and author of the Corvid Research blog.

Swift noted that studies of some corvid species have found evidence of emotional recognition, fairness and "some of the strongest evidence across the animal world" for theory of mind. However, when it comes to studying an emotion as complex and subjective as schadenfreude, she said that researchers "haven’t quite crossed that threshold."

In the study of animal emotions, she said "we have barely started to scratch the surface."

Mammals first appeared on Earth over 200 million years ago, scuttling around alongside the dinosaurs as little mouse-sized creatures. But after the asteroid hit 66 million years ago, it was their time to shine ‪—‬ and the Age of Mammals began.

But the path to understanding our own branch of the animal kingdom hasn't been straightforward. In this excerpt from "The Story of the Mammals in 25 Discoveries" (Columbia University Press, 2026), author Donald R. Prothero looks at a time when philosophers and early naturalists believed giants roamed the Earth and explores the idea that extinction was heresy.

Many cultures around the world have a mythology that includes legends about gigantic races of humans that lived on Earth in the dark mysterious past. They may have fought against the gods, or they may have been destroyed by floods. These stories were reinforced by the discovery of gigantic bones, much larger than those of any living human, all over the Mediterranean and Europe.

The Greek philosopher Empedocles (492-432 BCE) reported gigantic bones from Sicily, supposedly remnants of a race of giants. The Roman historian Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) mentioned fossil ivory in the ground, and according to the Roman historian Suetonius (69- 122 CE), Emperor Augustus owned a collection of large bones that had been found on the island of Capri, near Pompeii. The skulls of elephants, with their huge central opening in front (for the trunk), were thought to be the skulls of the one-eyed cyclops.

In the Middle Ages, these huge bones were again attributed to gigantic humans or other monsters (Genesis 6:4) that were drowned in Noah's flood. Giant tusks from Siberia were thought to be the horns of the mythical unicorn or the tusks of dragons. In some places gigantic teeth or vertebrae of mammoths were revered as relicts of saints. Nearly every possibility was suggested except that they were the bones of extinct elephants.

In the early seventeenth century, some giant bones dug up in a sand pit near Langon in southeastern France were exhibited around France as the remains of the giant Teutons, Germanic tribes that once roamed Gaul and were defeated by the Romans in 101 BCE.

But in 1613 the famous anatomist Riolan attacked the prevailing interpretation, suggesting that they were the bones of an elephant. This generated a raging controversy between physicians and anatomists and the barber-surgeons who called them gigantic human bones. Others thought they were hoaxes or generated by mysterious "plastic forces" (vis plastica in Latin) that percolated through Earth. Still others attacked the anatomists for questioning the biblical account of giants on Earth. The controversies died down in 1618 without being resolved, and for the next two centuries most people continued to interpret new finds as gigantic humans.

The giant bones that kept turning up in the New World were also a source of much mystery and consternation. The Native American tribes usually attributed them to giant monsters fought by their ancestors and incorporated them into their folklore. When these bones were first seen by European settlers, they were thought to be the bones of gigantic humans that roamed the earth in biblical times. Others thought that the giant tasks so revered by the Native Americans were the works of Satan, placed there to tempt the believer.

In 1519, the Spanish explorer and conquistador Hernan Cortez received a bone of a "giant," a gift from the friendly Tlascalan tribe of Mexico during the conquest of the Aztecs. He sent it back to the King of Spain as proof that giants at once lived in the New World. In 1706, the Reverend Cotton Mather of the Massachusetts Bay Colony pronounced them to be "the remains of godless giants drowned in Noah's Flood." He sent some bones to the Royal Society in London to have them certified as evidence of this "wicked giant" because biblical scholars were calculating Adam's height at 123 ft. 9 in.

The Royal Society never pronounced an opinion on these bones, although by that time many members were becoming skeptical of the literal interpretations of Genesis. The stifling effect of religious dogma about giants and Noah's flood was complicated by another idea: the notion of Divine Providence. An omnipotent, benevolent God would never allow any of his creatures to become extinct. As the poet Alexander Pope wrote in An Essay on Man (1734), "who sees with equal eye, as God of all, a hero perish, or a sparrow fall."

The prevailing concept was that of a "great chain of being" that linked the animals to man to the angels to God. Breaking any link in that chain implied the destruction of the whole chain. In the same poem, Pope also wrote: "Where, one step broken, the great scale's destroy'd; From Nature's chain whatever link you strike, Ten or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike."

By the late 1700s, however, it was becoming more and more apparent that many of the recently discovered fossils had no living counterparts. Remote corners of the world were being explored, and although many new and surprising beasts were discovered, clearly the gigantic beasts were not hiding in South America or Africa or the East Indies. Many strange fossils, such as the bones of hippopotami in Paris and London, were clearly related to tropical animals, but it was assumed that these bones had been washed from the tropics during the Great Flood.

The notion of extinction was still blasphemous. The New World soon provided unequivocal evidence that these large bones were not simply gigantic humans. In 1739, Charles le Moyne, the second Baron de Longueil, left Montreal with French and Indian troops to fight the Chickasaw Indians along the Ohio River. Somewhere along the Ohio he found the remains of what appeared to be three elephants. When the war ended in 1740, le Moyne collected the bones and shipped them to New Orleans and ultimately to Paris, where they came to the attention of French naturalists.

In the 1740s and 1750s, English settlers in the region sent more of these bones from Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, off to England and also to Benjamin Franklin in America. Most of the bones (especially the tusks) were clearly like those of elephants and mammoths, but the teeth were puzzling. They were clearly unlike any living elephant, yet they were part of an animal of elephantine size. (We now know that these were specimens of the American mastodon, Mammut americanum.) Franklin speculated that the teeth were reminiscent of a carnivorous animal, although he and others later decided it was a vegetarian.

In 1769, the famous British anatomist William Hunter took the carnivory suggestion seriously and suggested this was not a true elephant but a "pseudelephant" or "American incognitum" (Latin for "unknown") that had independently developed ivory tusks:

"This monster, with the agility and ferocity of a tiger . . . cruel as the bloody panther, swift as the descending eagle, terrible as the angel of night. . . . And if this animal was indeed carnivorous, which I believe cannot be doubted, though we may as philosophers regret it, as men we cannot but thank Heaven that its whole generation is probably extinct."

This very precocious suggestion was still not accepted by naturalists of the time. Nevertheless, remains of the "incognitum" and also of the Siberian mammoth (including frozen carcasses with hair and skin) were turning up again and again. Georges Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), concluded in his Théorie de la terre in 1749 that although most of the supposedly extinct animals were hiding somewhere in an unknown region, it was likely that the large terrestrial mammals such as the mammoth and "incognitum" had actually perished.

By 1778, Buffon was relating their disappearance to his ideas of violent cataclysms in Earth's early history. During this time the climate was warmer and polar regions had once been tropical, so "elephants" (meaning mammoths) could live in Siberia. This implied a nonbiblical Earth of much greater antiquity. Buffon suggested it was as much as 75,000 to 3,000,000 years old, rather than the 6,000 years demanded by most literalist biblical scholars.

Naturally, such revolutionary ideas were not popular with the theologians in the Sorbonne. Buffon was protected by the king, however, so he was not persecuted for his heresy, although his ideas were not widely accepted either. The fact of extinction was finally proved by one of the greatest scientists of all time, the Baron Georges Cuvier (1769-1832).

Jean Leopold Frederic Georges Cuvier was an impressive man. Tall of stature, he had a "massive" head crowned by a large mane of hair. One admirer wrote that his head "gave to his entire person an undeniable cachet of majesty and to his face an expression of profound meditation." After his death, scientists weighed his brain and found that it was a massive 1830 grams [4 pounds], more than 400 grams [14 ounces] above average, and 200 grams [7 ounces] heavier than any brain ever measured at that time.

More important, he was one of the most brilliant men of his time, with a command of many subjects, some of which he invented all by himself. Before Cuvier, natural history was a field that resembled stamp collecting, with many amateur naturalists compiling long lists and descriptions of new species without analyzing the similarities in their anatomy. Cuvier almost single-handedly revolutionized natural history by dissecting many different animals and discovering their underlying similarities and differences.

This became the foundation of comparative anatomy, a subject that has been fundamental to biology ever since. Naturalists and explorers sent him their fossil bones, and he was the first to correctly describe many types of extinct animals. Cuvier solved the mystery of the puzzling fossil teeth called the "Great Incognitum" and recognized them as the teeth of the elephant-like mastodons. He also correctly deciphered the huge marine lizards we now know as mosasaurs.

For this reason, he is also considered to be the founder of vertebrate paleontology. Cuvier is most famous for his "law of correlation of parts," wherein he discovered that certain types of anatomical features tend to be associated. If you are a flesh eater, you will have sharp teeth and claws; if you are a plant eater, you will have flat grinding teeth and hooves; and so on. Using this law, paleontologists have been able to reconstruct whole animals from just a few key bones because the other parts of the anatomy are so predictable.

Excerpted from The Story of the Mammals in 25 Discoveries: Amazing Fossils and the People Who Found Them by Donald R. Prothero. Copyright (c) 2026 Donald R. Prothero. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

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Cape Cod is known for its lobsters and its growing great white shark population, but now the holiday hotspot has another extraordinary animal to showcase: a rare two-headed diamondback terrapin that is surviving against the odds.

The baby turtle, which weighed just 0.18 ounces (5.2 grams), was brought to the Cape Wildlife Center in Barnstable, Massachusetts, on Sept. 17, according to a Facebook post from the wildlife center. It was originally found by representatives of the Mass Audubon Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary at a protected nesting site in the town of Wellfleet.

The turtle's condition, known as bicephaly, is a rare developmental disorder that's typically caused by the incomplete splitting of a single embryo during the formation of identical twins. It results in conjoined twins that share one body but have two fully formed, independent heads.

Zak Mertz, CEO of New England Wildlife Centers, which includes the Cape Wildlife Center, said the recently discovered diamondback terrapin (Malaclemys terrapin) is an uncommon example of bicephaly in turtles. Both genetics and epigenetics ‪—‬ the study of how genes and environment can interact ‪—‬ are thought to play a role in the condition's development.

"Our understanding based on the available research is that bicephaly is caused by both genetic and epigenetic factors," Mertz told Live Science in an email.

"It may have to do with the relatively long lifespan of the turtles, their preference for returning to the same nesting sites, and a limited gene pool due to their conservation status," he said."It may also be influenced by environmental factors, such as the temperature, humidity during incubation, physical characteristics of the nesting sites, or potentially even things the parents are exposed to in the environment."

Having two heads is rare but not unprecedented. According to the center, this is the third bicephalic terrapin found in the area in the past five years, providing another opportunity to learn more about the animals. Other wild animals with bicephaly have been found in recent years, including a two-headed porpoise found off the coast of the Netherlands and a two-headed dolphin that was found on a Turkish beach.

A 2021 study found that rare two-headed and partially duplicated sea turtle embryos and hatchlings showed significant craniofacial and spinal abnormalities and were generally smaller than typical hatchlings. The research found bicephalic turtles faced survival challenges because their abnormal anatomy could impair coordinated movement, feeding, and other functions essential for survival, highlighting the importance of monitoring such deformities as potential indicators of population and environmental health.

Diamondback terrapins are found in brackish marshlands along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States. Brackish waters have more salt than fresh water but less salt than seawater, and often occur where the freshwater of a lake or river meets the salty sea. These terrapins are classified as threatened by the Massachusetts Endangered Species Act, and their broader conservation status at the federal level is currently under review.

Veterinarians are monitoring the rare terrapin's health closely. "It is fascinating and an area that certainly merits more study," Mertz said. "We are excited to care for these two and learn as much as we can to inform future study in the process."

The world's smallest crocodiles use a sneak attack to hunt bats in hellish underground caves filled with poop, a new video reveals.

The footage of the never-before-seen behavior was captured for the upcoming National Geographic series "Africa: Earth's Wild Home" and offers a rare glimpse into the lives of Gabon's mysterious cave-dwelling dwarf crocodiles.

Dwarf crocodiles (Osteolaemus tetraspis), which grow to only around 5 feet (1.5 meters) long, live across West and Central Africa and are typically found in forests, rivers, swamps and similar surface habitats. However, the cave population filmed in the new series is unique.

Discovered in 2008, these subterranean explorers spend their days in total darkness, stalking mounds of bat excrement (guano) in the remote Abanda Caves of Gabon on the west coast of Central Africa. Researchers knew the crocs were feeding on bats and insects, but they weren't sure how because the crocs wouldn't hunt with humans in their lair.

Now, thanks to a team of brave scientists and filmmakers — and special, remote camera equipment — we can watch the crocs catch their prey for the first time.

"I've been working with this population for almost 15 or 16 years now, and that's something we've never been able to see," Matt Shirley, a conservation ecologist and Rolex National Geographic Perpetual Planet Explorer, told Live Science. "No matter how deeply in the bat guano I've been, or how long I've spent in the caves, whenever I'm in there, the crocodiles just aren't doing what they want to be doing."

Gabon's cave crocodiles will be featured in the "Jungle" episode of "Africa: Earth's Wild Home." This seven-part series spans the African continent, covering a variety of wildlife and landscapes, with narration from actress Wunmi Mosaku.

Shirley said the crocodile footage can be used to reconstruct the cave population's behavior patterns and trends.

Researchers aren't sure when the dwarf crocodiles adopted their subterranean lifestyle, but they might have been living in the caves for thousands of years. The cave system is remote and difficult to access, so it's no surprise that the crocs went unnoticed until comparatively recently. Shirley described conditions within the system as intense, with very enclosed spaces, bats and copious amounts of guano to navigate.

"If it's the dry season, you're just kind of standing on this like fluffy mattress cloud of bat guano, but if there's any rain, you're in a bat guano slurry," Shirley said. "Sometimes, to catch the crocodiles, I'm either literally standing with up to my neck in bat guano, or I'm having to lay down to crawl through tunnels and basically move through bat guano slurry, head to toe."

Shirley was part of the team that first documented the crocodiles in 2010. That work led to a 2016 study, published in the African Journal of Ecology, comparing the dwarf crocodiles in the cave to those living aboveground in the forests.

Living in acidic bat guano effectively tans the crocs' grayish skin, eroding it over time to give them a distinct orange color. However, Shirley and his colleagues have found that the cave crocodiles are often better fed than their forest-dwelling counterparts, which the team thinks is likely due to the abundance of prey and lack of predators in the caves.

Currently, the cave population is part of the broader dwarf crocodile species, but it stands out as a genetically isolated group. Shirley noted that the animals have clearly made a choice to occupy the extreme cave environment, despite the potential health risks and noisy neighbors, and are therefore quite possibly dictating their own evolution.

By staying in the cave and mating only with each other, they are accumulating genetic differences that should help them better adapt to their environment, he explained.

"It's very 'Jurassic Park,' you know ‪—‬ life-finds-a-way sort of a scenario," Shirley said. "This is evolution in action."

Dwarf crocodiles are classified as vulnerable to extinction on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. However, the IUCN hasn't assessed these crocodiles in decades, so their current conservation status is uncertain.

As a common source of protein for people in parts of West and Central Africa, the species is threatened by overharvesting, as well as by habitat loss, National Geographic reported. However, the dwarf crocodiles also have a very wide range and are particularly abundant in Gabon.

The Abanda Caves, where the subterranean population lives, sit outside Gabon's protected areas, making the cave crocs more vulnerable to any human activities in the area. Shirley noted that the Gabonese government is undergoing a process to protect the caves as a specific reserve.

"I don't think we're worried about extinction of the species, but until that classification of a protected area comes to fruition, the cave population is definitely at risk," he said.

"Africa: Earth's Wild Home" premieres on National Geographic Friday (Oct. 2) at 8 p.m. EDT and will be available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu the following day.

A predatory bird-like dinosaur with four wings discovered in China adds evidence to the idea that flight evolved several times in different dinosaur groups.

The exceptionally well-preserved feathered dinosaur, which has been named Norellraptor barsboldi, was 3 years old when it died and measured just 21 inches (57 centimeters) long. It was found in the Early Cretaceous Jiufotang Formation in northeastern China, which dates to between 145 million and 100 million years ago.

N. barsboldi had the sharply curved predatory teeth and claws you'd expect of a little, generalist predator and was probably eating early mammals, lizards, amphibians and juvenile dinosaurs, said Scott Hartman, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who wasn't involved in the study. "It wouldn't have been attacking any large dinosaurs. That would be like mosquitoes attacking battleships," he told Live Science.

N. barsboldi was a microraptor. Microraptors were close relatives of birds but not their ancestors; birds belong to a neighboring clade called Avialae. Fossils show that both microraptors and early bird-winged animals in the Avialae clade ‪—‬ such as Archaeopteryx, which lived in the Late Jurassic, about 150 million years ago ‪—‬ had feathers. The puzzle has been whether flight originated in an ancestor of both of these groups or if feathers — and potentially flight — evolved more than once.

The description of N. barsboldi by Andrea Cau, a paleontologist at the OPHIS Paleontological Museum and Herpetological Center in Italy, and his colleagues adds evidence to the latter theory. The team's analysis found that around 30% of the 194 anatomical changes identified across microraptor evolution also evolved in the bird lineage. Aside from feathers, these changes included the fusion of bony projections to the ribs that created a rigid torso, forelimb bones that were relatively robust compared with the hind limbs, and an ulna (the primary weight-bearing bone for a wing) that was longer than the humerus.

However, the team's comparisons with other fossils revealed that the order in which these shared features evolved was different in the two groups. They reported the findings Tuesday (Sept. 29) in the journal Nature Communications.

"This demonstrates that microraptors acquired traits convergent with the early evolutionary stages of true birds, albeit through a distinct evolutionary pathway, supporting the hypothesis that flapping flight evolved independently in non-avialan dinosaurs and birds," said Rui Pei, a paleontologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences who wasn't involved in the work.

"I'm very happy that they've come to the conclusion that there were probably independent origins of flight amongst various groups," Hartman said. "I strongly agree with them."

Even though microraptors had four wings, many of their features were similar to those of modern flying birds. Therefore, "it is reasonable to expect that these non-avialan theropods were capable of behaviors comparable to those of modern avian species," Pei told Live Science by email.

Hartman suggested that microraptors might have done a mix of gliding and flapping. "I doubt they could climb trees like a squirrel to gain height because their forelimbs don't have that range of motion," he said. However, they might have been able to take off after running down a slope, and rather than gliding down from trees, they might have leapt from hills or cliffs, Hartman added.

"There are a bunch of features, like a large well-ossified [bony] sternum or breastbone that could allow for larger pectoral muscles, so they probably have a pretty solid downstroke, which is what generates the thrust to keep it going forward," Hartman said.

The hind wings would have been held directly under the body for stabilizing flight, braking and allowing for rapid control of tight turns. "These are clearly little predatory buggers," he said. "If you're leaping onto things or dropping onto things, that kind of control would be pretty important. It's always best to surprise animals by landing where you planned to rather than somewhere you didn't plan to."

It's also possible that the wings had other purposes, such as demonstrating fitness to mates or warming eggs on a nest, he said.

The global fishing industry is plagued by problems. Overfishing remains a severe threat, while production and consumption have increased to record levels. Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing continues to thrive, thereby disrupting marine ecosystems and attempts to manage our oceans sustainably. All the while, climate change is warming the seas, shifting marine populations and shrinking fish body size.

It's amid this background that journalist and author Rose George wrote "Every Last Fish: A Deep Dive into the World of Fishes and Fishing" (Granta Books, 2025). George had previously written an award-winning book on the shipping industry, "Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry that Brings You 90% of Everything," (Granta Books, 2013) and had become more aware of the significant issues facing the fishing industry.

For the book, she traveled across continents, joining trawlers, fishers and aquaculturists (fish farmers) to learn more about the problems they face, while delving into fish intelligence and welfare with scientists. Finally, George also reveals some of the atrocities that take place at sea, including slavery and murder, as she tells Live Science in this interview about the book. "You can't police the sea; it's too big," she said.

"Every Last Fish" has been short-listed for the 2026 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.

Hannah Osborne: You're a vegetarian who gets bad motion sickness. What made you want to write a book about the fishing industry?

Rose George: When I wrote my shipping book, I had a lot of skepticism about how the shipping industry works. But whenever I spoke to shipping people, they would say, "Well, if you think we're bad, you should look at fishing." And they were right. Fishing is way more complicated, and baffling, and a difficult industry in many ways.

One of the other big triggers was that when I was doing my initial research, two things struck me. One was that for the first time in history, we're going to be eating more farmed fish than hunted fish. We have switched from hunter-gatherers to settled farmers, even though in this case, it's fish. There are all the horrible statistics about how many fish stocks are overfished and depleted and under pressure. People kind of know that, and I think they kind of switch off from it — it's quite hard to enthuse them about the fact that the ocean is in such a terrible state.

One of the things that really fascinated me was the research into fish abilities and fish sentience. I definitely wanted this book to be not just about fishing but about fishes, the creatures, the animals. Because I don't think we think of them as animals. Most people think of animals as kind of furry, cute things that they can empathize with or sympathize with, whereas sympathizing with fish, I mean, Samuel Coleridge called them "slimy things in the water." And, you know, they're not slimy, but I still think that's an overwhelming attitude [among the public].

In the last 20 years or so, [scientists have] looked at what their abilities actually are. They live in a very complex environment. They have to have complex abilities. I absolutely loved the research. In one study, scientists had goldfish steering around in an aquarium. It was nuts but fascinating.

I wanted to look at the industry and look at the animals. I wanted to make it more than a dead thing on the plate. And I hope I did that.

HO: You traveled to so many places for this book. Were there common themes among fishers from across the world? And if so, what were they, in terms of their problems, their work ethic, the things that they have to deal with?

RG: I didn't go fishing in Norway, but I did go to salmon farms, which is quite different. But I would say that there is a sense that it's a unique profession. It's a dangerous profession because you are in a dangerous element and every single ship can sink, no matter what size.

People die, and people get injured. There's all the heavy machinery if it's a sizable fishing vessel with winches and chains and everything under tension. And, of course, accidents happen. The fishing industry has gotten a lot safer in some parts of the world, but it's still dangerous.

For example, let's compare the small-boat fishermen who I went fishing with in England and the Senegalese fishers. There's a lot of similarity in that there's a pride in what they do and the sense of being beleaguered. Definitely in Senegal, it's very pronounced in that a lot of their fish has just been stolen by European and other nations, and has ended up as fish meal in European countries. In Senegal, Sardinella — a variety of sardine — is a staple fish, and it's just not there anymore. What happens is, the more you fish, the more you tend to fish the smaller fish. So you'll fish down. You'll end up fishing juvenile fish. And then, of course, you've got no fish to grow up.

I think West Africa, in general, is a very sad case of how the fishing industry works because hardly any of it is illegal. In Senegal, the government sold all the licenses to the Chinese trawlers and Spanish trawlers and what have you. A lot of the problems are from legal fishing.

Rex was banned from fishing wild salmon, and his fishing season was curtailed. [Editor's note: Rex Harrison is a small-scale fisher in England whom George spent time with for the book.] They definitely feel they're drowning in paperwork. I think that it's made it a very defensive industry, particularly in the U.K. because it is such a tiny industry. The biscuit industry is bigger. Yet fishing has this massive kind of cultural place that is really quite a nostalgic thing. There is an industry, but it's nothing like it was and the number of fishermen is much smaller. Young men don't want to go into fishing; young women don't want to go into fishing.

There's this sense of feeling beleaguered, but there's still pride in the fact that they do this activity, which is unique. They are the last hunters, really.

HO: What did you think was the biggest disconnect between the regulations and the reality of being on a boat?

RG: The fishing industry is so complex. It could mean a 3-foot [1 meter] wooden boat with no engine or one of the massive trawlers. That's all the fishing industry. But routinely, across the board, what the fishing industry needs is more and better monitoring.

You can't monitor a vessel at sea. It has to be self-reported. So what goes on at sea? All we have are fishing observers doing an extremely risky job. I think it's only about 2% of the fishing fleet that has an observer on board. There are some fish stocks that have much better, higher rates of observers. For example, in the U.S., Alaska — the Pacific Coast — has a very good observer system. [Editor's note: Fishing observers are independent specialists who travel on commercial vessels to monitor compliance and regulations.]

But then you look at Eritara [Aati Kaierua], the fishing observer from Kiribati who was pretty obviously murdered. There are observers of a lot of those big tuna boats in the Pacific. But routinely, what happens when a fishing observer goes missing or is injured or dies is, you get these forensic reports that say they all died of hypertension ‪—‬ it's like it's an epidemic down there. But they're all we have — the fishing observers — because there's no remote electronic monitoring yet. That would be much better. I think what we need is more data. But then again, you need someone to process the data, and you need a way for the data to be accurately sent. Self-reporting has its limits as a robust monitoring tool.

It's why you might find that the fish you're eating is not what you think it is, because there are so many opportunities for swaps. One fisher may have reached his quota on a particular stock of fish. There are lots of opportunities, particularly when you get into illegal fishing. You get something called trans-shipment, which is two fishing vessels exchanging catches at sea.

HO: You just touched on the observers, and there are some awful stories in the book. What did you find most shocking while you were researching and writing the book?

RG: What shocked me the most was meeting the four Ghanaians who had taken jobs on a scalloper, thinking that the U.K. was reputable and everything was aboveboard. All their safety training had been done. Then, they got to work on this scalloper, and it was just a horror show. This was a scalloper that was working in the U.K. EEZ. [Editor's note: An EEZ, or exclusive economic zone, is the region between 14 and 230 miles (22.5 to 370 kilometers) from a country's coast that can be explored for its marine resources]. It was never on the high seas. It was always off the U.K., and yet these men were treated appallingly.

This is a particular company that was known to be rogue and has been somewhat prosecuted. What arose at that point was — and what the International Transport Workers' Federation highlighted around the time — that these cases were coming to light, and a lot of fishing vessels were using what was called trans-shipment visas.

What that essentially means is, if you're working on a ship and you call in at one country but you immediately get on your ship, you get a trans-shipment visa. Because [the crewmembers are] on these visas, they couldn't really come ashore; they were basically imprisoned on their boats. And that's in the U.K.

There are lots of perfectly good operators on the seas. But if you do want to be a criminal, there is no better place to do it. That is a problem. You can't police the sea; it's too big.

HO: On the flip side, you spent so much time with fishers. What was the most moving story for you?

RG: I really loved Rex's story of saving the birds. Rex looks like a Viking. He's such a nice guy, but he's quite eccentric. He had been fishing in Filey Bay [off the eastern coast of the U.K.] for 40 years and had just accepted that bycatch is a huge problem in fishing. When you catch one species, often you have to catch others. And often they end up just being chucked back into the water and they won't survive. It's just needless slaughter.

But another problem is seabird bycatch, because obviously the seabirds want the fish. Filey is right next to Bempton Cliffs, which is an RSPB [Royal Society for the Protection of Birds] reserve that's very famous for its puffins, but it's also got guillemots and kittiwakes and all sorts. Rex was just really sort of inured to this death toll of seabirds in his net. Then, this beautiful friendship arose between him and this guy from BirdLife International, Rory [Crawford].

Rory remembers turning up, and Rex and all his fellow fishers are kind of standing there with their arms folded, which is kind of typical. But they managed to become friends. And because Rex respected Rory, and Rory respected Rex, Rex changed his nets to a darker filament so that birds would see them more clearly, and changed the design of them so that they wouldn't get caught. It reduced bird bycatch in Filey Bay by 90%. It's just extraordinary.

I [also] really liked the fact that Captain Tom McClure [a trawler from the English county of Cornwall] and I managed to be friends, even though we disagree so profoundly about bottom trawling, and we always will. I think it's a terrible fishing method, but you don't have to be adverse. He still invites me out on his trawler, but given I was sick on it last time, I don't think I'm going to do that anytime soon. But the offer's there, which is nice.

HO: I really liked the story of Lillian Bilocca and everything that she did to try and improve the safety standards for fishers in the '70s and '80s. Do you think that safety has improved enough, or is there still a long way to go?

RG: It's definitely improved a lot. Lillian Bilocca was just a wonderful woman — a working class hero. She was a fishwife, worked in a fish processing factory, and it was a terrible time. In 1968, three full trawlers went down with only one survivor ‪—‬ about 50 or 60 men dead from one town.

It was a very close-knit town. Lillian became this astonishing campaigner. They ended up going to London to meet ministers, and this raft of measures was put through with astonishing speed just because of the publicity and the ministers were embarrassed.

But she had to face such enormous hostility. The trawler industry hated her. The trawler owners — their incentive was obviously to get as much fish as possible — so they would send out their boats to really unsafe Icelandic waters in the deepest winter. It was ludicrously unsafe, and at the time, the boats had no radio operator. There was no medical ship nearby. There was no help, and they just went down.

Since then, there have been loads of measures, but there are still serious issues.

HO: There's a lot of grim reading in the book about the state of the oceans, the industry, the things that happen at sea, and there doesn't seem to be an awful lot of change on the horizon. Did you see any signs of hope or signals that things could change that will make the fishing industry more sustainable and less destructive?

RG: Yes and no. I mean, if you learn anything about fishing, I don't think you're going to come away from it particularly optimistic. But then there are people who are absolute experts about fishing who do find some optimism, so we have to learn from that.

One of the biggest pieces of environmental legislation passed last year was the Global Ocean Treaty, which was amazing and astonishing and had all the NGOs doing press releases with exclamation marks. They were all absolutely delighted. The reason that is important is that most international legislation operates on consensus. So you have to wait for like 180 countries to agree, which is why the International Maritime Organization is so slow, because it operates on consensus. The Global Ocean Treaty does not, so states can nominate parts of the high seas that they want to be protected. It can be a lot more flexible, a lot more nimble, and it could protect the high seas.

The downside is that only 10% of fishing happens on the high seas. So although we need to protect as much of the ocean as possible, it may be that's not where the major problem lies, but it's a really good start.

The other thing that gave me hope is … that it is quite impressive how quickly the ocean can recover when given the chance. When there have been no-take zones established … they are astonishing because sea life recovers very quickly.

Also, it expands because obviously the fish move; the populations recover; they move; things grow. It's such a win-win situation just to protect small pockets of the ocean and see that protective effect expand. But to do that, we have to stop taking everything from the ocean and assuming it's got an infinite bounty, because it clearly doesn't.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

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Rare fossils discovered in Japan more than 30 years ago are from a new species of armored dinosaur — one whose ancestors likely reached Asia by trekking across a land bridge, a new study finds.

The newly named dinosaur, a type of nodosaurid, is now one of just three species of its kind found in Asia to date. The scarcity of nodosaurids in Asia, and the fact that the newly described beast is similar anatomically to those from North America, hint that its species likely arose from a migration from North America to Asia via the Bering Land Bridge, an ancient strip of land that connected present-day Alaska and Russia, researchers reported in the February 2027 issue of the journal Cretaceous Research.

"It's super cool to see [the specimen] getting a new look and a new name," said Victoria Arbour, manager of research and collections at the Royal B.C. Museum in Canada. Arbour was not involved in the new work.

Nodosaurids are armored dinosaurs covered in bony plates. They are closely related to ankylosaurids, but they lack the heavy tail clubs ankylosaurids used to protect themselves from predators. Nodosaurid fossils have primarily been found in North America and Europe, though a few have been uncovered in Asia.

In the new study, a team of researchers revisited one such fossil specimen originally discovered in 1995 on Hokkaido, the northernmost main island of Japan. The scientists performed computed tomography (CT) scans of the fossils, which are somewhere between 93 million and 100 million years old, and include the back of the skull, part of the lower jaw, and several teeth and bony plates.

CT scanning enables researchers to make digital 3D models of specimens, and "lets you just get more information than you'd be able to have otherwise, because you can look inside without breaking [the fossil]," Arbour told Live Science.

Based on the CT scans and an anatomical analysis, the team determined that the fossils represented a new species of nodosaurid, which they dubbed Nipponopelta yezoensis. "Nippon" refers to Japan, and "pelta" means "shield" in Greek. "Yezo" is the traditional name for Hokkaido.

N. yezoensis is closely related to North American nodosaurids, the team found. The dino's ancestors may have migrated from North America to Asia via a land bridge in what is now the Bering Strait 100 million to 110 million years ago.

Coastal dinosaur?

A separate team of scientists originally uncovered the N. yezoensis specimen in marine sediments — rocks that formed under ancient seas. Nodosaurids didn't live in the ocean, so the findings suggest that after the animal died, its corpse may have been swept out to sea along a river or estuary and eventually sank to the ocean floor.

Several other nodosaurid fossils have been found in similar marine deposits, suggesting the creatures lived along coastlines. That may have helped them migrate along the Bering Land Bridge and disperse by following the coast, study co-author Darla Zelenitsky, a dinosaur paleobiologist at the University of Calgary, told Live Science.

But just because nodosaurids are most commonly found in coastal environments doesn't mean that they couldn't have lived further inland as well, said Jordan Mallon, a paleontologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature who was not involved in the research. Upland and mountainous regions tend to produce few fossils because erosion wears down rocks in these biomes, Mallon told Live Science. So it's possible nodosaurids lived there, even if there's no fossil record of these armored dinosaurs at these locations.

"The nature of the fossil record is that it's patchy and incomplete," Mallon said. "It's very hard to tell a comprehensive story when you've only got a few pages out of a phone book's worth of time."

It's also not clear from the fossil record why so few nodosaurid species have been found in Asia compared with North America, Zelenitsky said. While several ankylosaurid species have been found further inland in Asia, few nodosaurid fossils have been unearthed on the continent.

"It could be the rock record, or just that [nodosaurids] weren't able to diversify as much in Asia," Zelenitsky said.

In future studies, "I hope that we find more of this animal," Mallon said. "It incites us to keep digging so that we can learn more about this animal and test some of our ideas about just what it is."

Scientists may have settled a decades-long debate about bat evolution, including controversial questions about when bats began to communicate and fly, a landmark study shows.

The new research, published Wednesday (Sept. 23) in the journal Nature, is the biggest bat DNA and fossil study ever conducted. Researchers created new, top-quality genome assemblies for 41 bat species, which they analyzed together with 62 existing sequences, providing a record dataset of 103 bat genomes and 44 bat fossils.

"It is extraordinary," study co-author Emma Teeling, a professor of molecular evolution and mammalian phylogenetics at University College Dublin, told Live Science in an email; "after decades of research and conflicting findings, we finally have uncovered how and when bats evolved."

The analysis suggests that bats arose in Europe around 65 million years ago, contradicting previous hypotheses proposing Asian, African or North American origins around 50 million years ago. Additionally, the researchers found that echolocation and true flight evolved early in bats, roughly 50 million years ago, rather than multiple times after modern bats began to diversify.

"This study transforms bat evolution research because it finally gives us a robust, resolved family tree and biogeography, something that's eluded scientists for decades," study co-author Sonja Vernes, a professor and head of the Neurogenetics of Vocal Communication Research Group at the University of St Andrews in the U.K., told Live Science in an email. "Get the tree right, and everything else about bat evolution starts to fall into place."

The study included members of all 21 recognized bat families, as well as some of the most remarkable bat species known on Earth. For example, the dataset contained the bumblebee bat (Craseonycteris thonglongyai, also called the Kitti's hog-nosed bat), which, at about 1 inch, or 2.5 centimeters, long, is thought to be the smallest mammal on Earth; and the Madagascar's sucker-footed bat (Myzopoda aurita), which has suction cups on its wrists and ankles to help it cling to smooth surfaces.

The research team — which comprised 137 scientists affiliated with Bat1K, an international project to map the genomes of all living bat species — used advanced DNA sequencing and computational techniques to identify individual genes and redraw the bat family tree.

"The value we bring is in innovative methods and unparalleled data that together yield an evolutionary tree that includes all these key fossils," study co-author Liliana Dávalos, a professor of phylogenetics and tropical deforestation at Stony Brook University in New York, told Live Science in an email.

Among other discoveries, the researchers found that a 50 million-year-old fossil from southern France of the extinct species Vielasia sigei, which shows signs of advanced echolocation, sits within the oldest branch of the bat family tree, indicating that echolocation predates the diversification of modern bats. This finding, together with the result that true flight appeared early in bats, helps to explain why this lineage has been so successful and evolved into more than 1,500 species worldwide today, according to the study.

After emerging in Europe, bats quickly dispersed into Africa, establishing a Europe-Africa hub from which they expanded into Asia, the Americas and Australia, the results suggest. Bats are the only mammals capable of true flight, meaning they flap their wings and don't simply glide or parachute. Throughout their evolution, they have acquired longer lifespans than other mammals of similar body size, surviving eight to 10 times longer than might be expected and showing few signs of aging and cancer, according to the study.

"Some bat species live remarkably long lives for their size, and can shrug off diseases that would make us seriously ill," Vernes said. "Until now, we didn't have a solid enough foundation to properly understand how bats evolved their most extraordinary traits, from flight and echolocation to their remarkable lifespans and resistance to disease. Now we do."

The genomic resource built for the study lays the foundation for future research into bats' longevity and disease resistance, with potential benefits for humans, Vernes said. "If we can understand how they do this at the genetic level, it could eventually help us design bat-inspired approaches to improve human health," she said.

The findings could also aid bat conservation through genomic methods. Protecting bats is important because they help to maintain healthy ecosystems by pollinating plants, dispersing seeds and consuming huge numbers of insect pests, Vernes said. There is also more work to be done to identify the ancestor of all living bats, whose genome the researchers took a first stab reconstructing.

"For me, this isn't the end of the story," Vernes said; "it's just the first chapter."

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."

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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.

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