The story of all land animals begins with a squat-limbed, long-bodied swamp fish. Sometime in the steamy mid-Devonian, a family of those fish followed plants and bugs onto land and became the first tetrapods, or four-legged vertebrates. But the fossil record from 390 million years ago is so sparse that it’s hard to find clues
Populations of the beloved monarch butterfly have dropped to concerning numbers over the past three decades, but ecologists haven’t quite been able to put a finger on the issues. The downward trends are likely due to a combination of factors, including habitat loss and climate change. But in a recent study published in the Journal
If you come across the nest of a paper wasp colony and happen to have a blacklight handy, you may get the chance to see a green alien glow emanating from its hexagonal cells. Paper wasps create a fine silk, most notably to wrap young wasp larvae in their cocoons for metamorphosis. But new research
In the early 1990s, ash trees in Michigan began to die. By 2009, 99 percent of ash trees were gone, leaving forests full of bare trunks. The culprit, identified in 2002, was an iridescent beetle not much larger than a grain of rice, called the emerald ash borer. Ash borers are native to northeast Asia
Excerpted from A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching: Getting to Know the World’s Most Misunderstood Bird by Rosemary Mosco. Illustrated by Rosemary Mosco. Workman Publishing © 2021. If you watch a pigeon throughout the day, you’ll see it do so much more than peck for food and crap on statues. It may dance, chase another bird
Around 150 million years ago, a long-necked dinosaur in southwest Montana became very ill. The unfortunate sauropod might have endured a sore throat, headaches, and difficulty breathing. Although the dinosaur in question is long dead, signs of this sickness are preserved in its neck bones as lumpy growths. These abnormal structures may have been caused
The forests of Hawaii are not be as loud as they were 50 or 100 years ago, or the riverbeds of Appalachian rivers as flush with mussels. Multiple birds and mollusks are among the 23 species that were formerly on the endangered species list and have now been declared extinct by the U.S. Fish and
Tartufo, the rosy-faced lovebird, has more limbs than you think. He’s got two wings, which, of course, he uses to fly. He’s got two legs, which he uses to grab branches and hop around the canopy. But when faced with an especially steep tree, he relies on a third: his head. Based on climbing experiments
No matter what terrifying figures the twisted human mind manifests, nature will always outdo our worst nightmares. With the spookiest time of year just around the corner, here are a few creepy crawlers to give you the shivers. Each creature on this list is real—and they don’t just exist at Halloween, either. We’ll start with
Growing up to 8 feet long and 1,700 pounds, polar bears are the largest carnivorous land mammals on the planet. Researchers have long tried to understand these enigmatic apex predators, but most wild polar bears live in hard-to-reach habitats above the Arctic Circle. Luckily, scientists don’t have to go all the way to the North
