1+ hour, 15+ min ago  (904+ words) Artist's impression of Urokodia. 518-million-year-old fossil from China may preserve the earliest known precursors to spiders' fangs. (CREDIT: Xiaodong Wang) Spiders are famous for the business end of their bodies, the sharp mouthparts that seize prey and help explain their…...

23+ hour, 15+ min ago  (1055+ words) Transparent jellyfish reveal how epithelial wounds switch between crawling, contraction, and group movement to heal fast. (CREDIT: Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4. 0) A jellyfish no wider than a dime can do something human skin cannot. When its surface is torn, the wound…...

2+ day, 19+ hour ago  (978+ words) New research suggests Earth may hold 14 million to 20 million insect species, far above the long-accepted estimate of 6 million. (CREDIT: Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4. 0) Insects may be even more dominant on Earth than scientists thought. A new estimate suggests the planet could…...

4+ day, 1+ hour ago  (919+ words) A fossil found in 1985 is now identified as Antarctica's first discovered dinosaur bone, a titanosaur vertebra from 82. 6 million years ago. (CREDIT: Andrew Mc Afee, Carnegie Museum of Natural History) A small tail vertebra picked up on a windswept Antarctic island…...

4+ day, 18+ hour ago  (1073+ words) A new Triassic fossil reveals a two-legged, beaked reptile that evolved along the crocodile lineage. (CREDIT: Jorge Gonzalez, NHMLAC Dinosaur Institute) More than 200 million years ago, life on Earth was experimenting with new forms. The Triassic period gave rise to…...

5+ day, 5+ hour ago  (1214+ words) A global study shows that mammals living in pairs or groups tend to live longer, highlighting the role of social behavior in lifespan. (CREDIT: Shutterstock) Life in the wild often comes down to survival, and for many species, survival depends…...

1+ week, 3+ hour ago  (1004+ words) Study finds great apes share a laughter rhythm dating back 15 million years, offering clues to how human speech evolved. (CREDIT: Scene from "Koko: The Gorilla Who Talks." 2016. BBC) A laugh can feel spontaneous, messy, almost impossible to pin down. But…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago  (1074+ words) Study finds published pterosaur wing reconstructions may miss much of the group's true shape and flight diversity. (CREDIT: Mark P Witton) Pterosaurs ruled the air long before birds did, and over more than 100 million years they grew into everything from…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago  (1051+ words) Great apes show stable cognitive differences, raising new questions about how ape intelligence is structured. (CREDIT: AI-generated image / The Brighter Side of News) That matters because much of comparative psychology has leaned on species-wide averages. If one species performs well…...

1+ week, 6+ day ago  (823+ words) New fossil evidence from crocodile-like early tetrapods known as embolomeres suggests they grew without undergoing amphibian-style metamorphosis. The finding challenges the long-held idea that the ancestors of amphibians, reptiles, and mammals all passed through a tadpole-like stage. (CREDIT: Berit Goding)…...