It’s smaller than your fingernail and kills more humans than any other animal on Earth. Now it’s spreading fast across New York, and it’s already infected people. The New York State Department of Health wants New Yorkers to remember the dangers of mosquito bites and protect against diseases like West Nile Virus and Eastern Equine Encephalitis (EEE). New York State …
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Standing around 10 feet tall, weighing around 220 pounds and with an axe-like beak capable of delivering devastating strikes, the terror bird would have proved a formidable foe for most creatures. But around 13 million years ago, one of them may have fallen prey to an even larger creature, a team of paleontologists in Colombia have discovered after examining bite …
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An unusual fossil brain suggests that the ancestors of spiders and other arachnids may have once scuttled around the sea, rather than on land as was long thought, a new study finds. The fossil shows that certain features of the brain of a now-extinct animal known as Mollisonia symmetrica are arranged backward compared with those of most modern arthropods, a …
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In a recent study, divers near Kumejima Island in Japan discovered an unusual sea creature with a distinctive panda-like appearance. These creatures, part of the Clavelina genus, were first thought to be part of an aquarium display, only to surprise researchers by being a completely new species. The discovery has drawn attention from marine biologists and citizen scientists alike, as …
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A beautiful turquoise‑and‑lilac sea creature that has been kept in hobbyist aquariums around the world for nearly two decades has finally been given a scientific species name. The modest crustacean hiding in plain sight turns out to be Cherax pulverulentus, an entirely new crayfish species no biologist had cataloged until now. Jiří Patoka of the Czech University of …
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A remarkable discovery of ancient fish fossils has revealed a chilling and unusual pattern: Tharsis, a now-extinct genus of ray-finned fish, may have met its end in the same tragic way. Analysis of fossilized specimens has shown that these carnivorous fish, which lived during the Jurassic period, frequently died with belemnites—large cephalopods—lodged in their gullets. This bizarre and fatal phenomenon …
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