Butterflies, bees, and even bats are celebrated as pollinators: creatures that travel from flower to flower to feed, and in the process, help fertilize the plants by spreading pollen. But some of nature's most diverse pollinators ...
Ecology
May 25, 2023
0
379
Two hundred and fifty-two million years ago, Earth experienced a mass extinction so devastating that it's become known as "the Great Dying." Massive volcanic eruptions triggered catastrophic climate change, killing off nine ...
Paleontology & Fossils
May 22, 2023
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247
Ants are pretty much everywhere. There are more than 14,000 different species, spread over every continent except Antarctica, and researchers have estimated that there are more than four quadrillion individual ants on Earth—that's ...
Evolution
Mar 31, 2023
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1072
Every year, millions of birds crash into windows in cities along their migratory path. For decades, scientists and volunteers have risen at dawn in spring and fall to collect the fallen birds, rehabilitating the injured and ...
Ecology
Mar 28, 2023
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75
Peru's first great empire, the Wari, stretched for more than a thousand miles over the Andes Mountains and along the coast from 600 to 1000 CE. The pottery they left behind gives archaeologists clues as to how the empire ...
Archaeology
Mar 14, 2023
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141
Color plays a huge role in our lives—the hues we wear and decorate with are a way for us to signal who we are, where we're from, and what we care about. And it's been that way for a long time. In a new study in the Journal ...
Archaeology
Mar 7, 2023
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276
Some cities only last a century or two, while others last for a thousand years or more. Often, there aren't clear records left behind to explain why. Instead, archaeologists piece together clues from the cities' remains to ...
Archaeology
Mar 3, 2023
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181
The pink-throated brilliant hummingbird, Heliodoxa gularis, has, unsurprisingly, a brilliant pink throat. So does its cousin, the rufous-webbed brilliant hummingbird, Heliodoxa branickii. When scientists found a Heliodoxa ...
Plants & Animals
Feb 28, 2023
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60
Antarctica is a tough place to work, for obvious reasons—it's bitterly cold, remote, and wild. However, it's one of the best places in the world to hunt for meteorites. That's partly because Antarctica is a desert, and ...
Planetary Sciences
Jan 18, 2023
3
835
In many ways, Madagascar is a biologist's dream, a real-life experiment in how isolation on an island can spark evolution. About 90% of the plants and animals there are found nowhere else on Earth. But these plants and animals ...
Evolution
Jan 10, 2023
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107
