Deep beneath the waves, tiny clams with shells usually about as big as a pea bore into pieces of sunken wood. The wood is food for them, as well as a home. These rare, scattered, sunken pieces of wood support miniature ecosystems ...
Evolution
Dec 15, 2022
0
116
Asexual reproduction is common for animals like starfish, deep-sea worms, and stick insects, but among vertebrates, it's a rarity. A process called parthenogenesis allows some female animals to fertilize an egg with their ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 15, 2022
0
53
The idea that climate change and geological events can shape evolution isn't a new one: anyone who's heard of dinosaurs knows that a big change in the environment (like, say, a meteor hitting the Earth 66 million years ago ...
Evolution
Nov 28, 2022
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60
Jeholornis was a raven-sized bird that lived 120 million years ago, among the earliest examples of dinosaurs evolving into birds, in what's now China. The fossils that have been found are finely preserved but smashed flat, ...
Evolution
Oct 24, 2022
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243
A big part of evolution is competition— when there are limited resources to go around, plants and animals have to duke it out for nutrients, mates, and places to live. That means that the flower-covered meadows of China's ...
Ecology
Oct 24, 2022
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21
SUE the T. rex is one of the most complete, best-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex specimens ever found. That level of preservation helps reveal details about SUE's life. For instance, SUE lived to a ripe old age of about thirty-three, ...
Paleontology & Fossils
Sep 30, 2022
5
126
Scientists studying mice from the Andes Mountains in Patagonia noticed something they couldn't explain: the mice from the western side of the mountains were bigger than the ones from the east, but DNA said that they were ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 1, 2022
1
455
They might not get as much attention as the Amazon Rainforest or the Great Barrier Reef, but the mountains of the Philippines are one of the most biodiverse places on the planet. Inch for inch, these misty cloud forests are ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 18, 2022
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296
Hundreds of animals eat fruit, from toucans to fruit bats to maned wolves to humans. But most fruit-bearing plants evolved relatively recently in Earth's history, showing up for the first time in the Cretaceous, the final ...
Ecology
Aug 16, 2022
0
263
In 2019, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft sent back images of a geological phenomenon no one had ever seen before: pebbles were flying off the surface of the asteroid Bennu. The asteroid appeared to be shooting off swarms of ...
Astronomy
Aug 11, 2022
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179
