Kākāpō (Strigops habroptilus) are large, flightless, nocturnal parrots with mottled green and yellow plumage that only breed every two to four years. Their breeding seasons are triggered by the mass fruiting of the rimu tree (Dacrydium cupressinum), a native conifer that can live for more than 600 years.

"It's always exciting when the breeding season officially begins, but this year it feels especially long-awaited after such a big gap since the last season in 2022," Deidre Vercoe, operations manager for kākāpō recovery at New Zealand's Department of Conservation, said in a statement.

The birds became critically endangered by the mid-1900s due to human expansion across New Zealand. Intensive management has raised kākāpō numbers from just 51 individuals over the last 30 years, but only 236 kākāpōs remain in the wild today, including 83 breeding females. All of them wear backpack radio transmitters to monitor their location and activities. Most kākāpō females raise one chick each breeding season.

The 2026 breeding season could produce the most chicks since records began 30 years ago, according to the statement. But the kākāpō recovery program is focusing on ensuring the birds can sustain themselves — not just the number of chicks they produce.

"Kākāpō are still critically endangered, so we'll keep working hard to increase numbers, but looking ahead, chick numbers are not our only measure of success," Vercoe said. "We want to create healthy, self-sustaining populations of kākāpō that are thriving, not just surviving. This means with each successful breeding season, we're aiming to reduce the level of intensive, hands-on management to return to a more natural state."

In previous years, being hand-raised by humans has led some kākāpō to imprint on people rather than other members of their own species. One, named Sirocco, made headlines when he attempted to mate with the head of a zoologist filming a documentary on the birds in 2009. That prompted creative rangers to develop a latex "kākāpō ejaculation helmet," Stuff reported in 2018.

This season, to reduce interference, the team plans to leave more eggs to hatch in kākāpō nests rather than in incubators, and limit how much they interact with the nests that hold more than one chick.

During the breeding season, male kākāpō come together to build networks of paths and depressions that amplify their booming mating calls. Each night, for weeks or months, their calls attract females to this communal area, called a lek. After mating, the female kākāpō incubates the eggs and raises the chicks alone.

Officials expect the first chicks of the season to hatch around mid-February.

Bird quiz: How much do you know about our feathered friends?

The woolly rhino (Coelodonta antiquitatis) tissue was found inside the mummified remains of a wolf pup, which was initially discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2011. A subsequent necropsy of the pup revealed its final meal: It dined on one of the last woolly rhinos on Earth. But now, scientists have worked out how to sequence the animal's full genome from the undigested bits of rhino flesh.

"Sequencing the entire genome of an Ice Age animal found in the stomach of another animal has never been done before," Camilo Chacón-Duque, a bioinformatician at Uppsala University in Sweden and co-author of the new study, said in a statement.

In the new research, published Wednesday (Jan. 14) in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution, researchers analyzed the woolly rhino muscle tissue and compared it with older examples to investigate the species' population size and level of inbreeding just prior to its extinction. That chunk of meat has provided unprecedented information about the demise of the woolly rhino.

Many species that go extinct leave clues to their decline in their geographic range, their population size, and their genomes. As populations of an animal decrease, they can become concentrated in a particular area. For example, woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) persisted until about 4,000 years ago on a remote island in Siberia. But their small population contributed to inbreeding, and this lack of genetic diversity may have ultimately doomed the mammoth. (Although another study suggests that these island mammoths died in a random mystery event.)

The woolly rhino, however, was widespread across northern Eurasia until about 35,000 years ago. Its geographic range contracted over time, and the species became concentrated in northeastern Siberia, before going extinct around 14,000 years ago. The piece of woolly rhino tissue discovered in the wolf pup's stomach was carbon-dated to 14,400 years ago, meaning the woolly rhino was likely one of the last of its kind.

Researchers generated the woolly rhino's genome from the preserved muscle tissue and compared it with two older genomes dated to 18,000 and 49,000 years ago. They discovered that the three rhinos had similar levels of inbreeding and genetic diversity, suggesting that there was a relatively stable woolly rhino population in northern Siberia until at least 14,400 years ago, and that their extinction must have happened rapidly after that.

"Our results show that the woolly rhinos had a viable population for 15,000 years after the first humans arrived in northeastern Siberia, which suggests that climate warming, rather than human hunting, caused the extinction," study co-author Love Dalén, an evolutionary genomics professor at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Sweden, said in the statement. The results build on previous work by several of the same researchers.

Rapid changes in the world's climate happened toward the end of the Pleistocene epoch (the last ice age), and many large mammals went extinct. The disappearance of the woolly rhino lines up with a period called the Bølling-Allerød interstadial, which involved an abrupt warming of the Northern Hemisphere's climate from around 14,700 to 12,900 years ago. This dramatically warmer climate may have wiped out the favored foods of the cold-adapted, herbivorous woolly rhino and thus contributed to their swift decline.

While the new genome does not resolve all the mysteries surrounding the extinction of the woolly rhino, the researchers demonstrated that it is possible to recover the DNA of one animal from inside another one.

"It was really exciting, but also very challenging, to extract a complete genome from such an unusual sample," study lead author Sólveig Guðjónsdóttir, a researcher at Stockholm University, said in the statement.

The researchers hope their achievement will pave the way for future DNA and genomic analysis of animal tissues from "unlikely sources."

Mammoth quiz: Test your knowledge of the ice age beasts

"Pole to Pole with Will Smith" is a seven-part documentary series following the actor and musician across a series of expeditions, starting in the South Pole and ending in the North Pole, taking in the Amazonian rainforest, Himalayas, Pacific islands and African deserts.

The series aims to blend personal adventure with scientific discovery, while helping various field scientists undertake research.

How to watch "Pole to Pole with Will Smith" in the U.S.

"Pole to Pole with Will Smith" premieres in the U.S. on National Geographic and will be available to stream on Disney+.

The first two episodes will air from 9 p.m. ET / 6 p.m. PT on Tuesday Jan. 13 on TV. Then, on Jan. 14, all seven episodes will be available to stream in one go on Disney+.

How to watch "Pole to Pole with Will Smith" in the U.K.

"Pole to Pole with Will Smith" will also air on the National Geographic TV channel and the Disney+ streaming platform in the U.K.

The premiere is a day later than the U.S. release, landing on Jan. 14 at 8 p.m. GMT. All seven episodes will be available to stream on Disney+ for U.K. subscribers from Jan. 14.

Watch "Pole to Pole with Will Smith" from anywhere

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"Pole to Pole with Will Smith": Trailer

What to expect from "Pole to Pole with Will Smith": Synopsis

"Pole to Pole with Will Smith" is a seven-episode documentary series in which the Oscar-winning actor Will Smith travels to several continents in search of adventure and scientific discovery.

We can expect "cutting-edge science, environmental storytelling, and bold exploration", according to a Disney statement.

The first episode is based in the South Pole and sees Smith ski and trek across giant ice fields, while the series ends at the North Pole with Smith helping polar ecologist Allison Fong capture scientific samples beneath the ice.

In between, there are a pair of episodes in the Amazon, where venom is extracted from a giant tarantula and a single scale removed from a 17-foot (5 meters) green anaconda. There are also visits to Pacific islands threatened by rising seas, high-altitude villages in the Himalayas, and the inhospitable plains of the Kalahari Desert.

"This journey was unlike anything I’ve ever done — at times I feared I might not make it home! It’s an exploration not just of the planet’s edges, but of some of the most extraordinary people living there," Smith said in the statement. "From the coldest ice to the deepest jungles, the beauty of our world inspired my every step with awe and hope."

The series, said to be five years in the making, is produced by Westbrook Studios, Nutopia and Protozoa for National Geographic and Disney+.

"We’re inviting audiences to see our planet through Will’s eyes — with all the wonder, humor, and humanity he brings to every experience," said Tom McDonald, EVP, content at National Geographic. "It’s a thrilling adventure that embodies what National Geographic does best: combining jaw-dropping cinematography, powerful storytelling and a deeper understanding of how our world works — and why it matters."

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In 2024, scientists announced the discovery of a newfound anaconda species in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Now, in a new nature series, filmmakers have released nail-biting, never-before-seen footage of the moment they encountered the snake in the wild.

The footage transports viewers to the Baihuaeri Waorani Territory in the Amazon rainforest, where researchers were sampling anacondas in 2022 for a snake genetics study. In the video, venom expert Bryan Fry and actor Will Smith travel by boat with Indigenous Waorani guides along the banks of a murky river. In a small clearing, the group spots a gigantic anaconda, which the guides manage to immobilize so that Fry and Smith can take a piece of its scales.

The anaconda in the footage — which features in an episode of National Geographic's upcoming "Pole to Pole with Will Smith" docuseries — is a female measuring 16 to 17 feet (4.9 to 5.2 meters) long, Fry estimates in the show. There is a danger she might bite, says one of the Waorani guides who helps pin down the snake, even if green anacondas aren't venomous. Anacondas are constrictors, meaning they kill prey by wrapping their bodies tightly around it, suffocating the animal before swallowing it whole.

The scale sample and others taken in 2022 revealed that green anacondas, which were previously thought to all belong to one species, actually form two separate species: Eunectes murinus, the already-identified southern green anaconda, and Eunectes akayima, the newfound northern green anaconda.

"Finding a new species is so often not a case of actively searching but rather having rigorous scientific process in place so that serendipity can strike," Fry, who is a professor of toxicology at The University of Queensland in Australia, told Live Science in an email. "The research into the genetics of the iconic green anaconda is textbook in this regard."

Genetic analyses indicate that E. murinus and E. akayima diverged 10 million years ago. Since then, northern and southern green anacondas have accumulated thousands of genetic differences adding up to a whopping 5.5% of their total DNA. By comparison, the level of mismatch between human and ape DNA is about 2%.

As its name suggests, the northern green anaconda inhabits the Amazon's northern basin, which includes parts of Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Trinidad, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. The southern green anaconda, on the other hand, is found in the Amazon's southern basin, which stretches across Brazil from Peru and Bolivia to French Guiana. Both species live in wetlands and rivers, spending most of their time submerged in water. Their olive-green coloring blends into their surroundings, which helps green anacondas ambush large prey such as capybaras (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris), caimans and deer.

Green anacondas are the world's heaviest snakes, with some specimens weighing more than 550 pounds (250 kilograms) and exceeding 12 inches (30 centimeters) in girth. Female northern green anacondas grow the largest and heaviest, while their male counterparts have more slender bodies. This means female and male northern green anacondas hunt different prey and occupy different positions in the food chain, Fry said.

"Females and males live in the same environment, but they feed differently," he said.

The northern green anaconda is the fifth described anaconda species in the world — and there may be more hiding out there, Fry told Live Science. "Despite anacondas having a state of fame exceeding that of any other reptile, they are really poorly known," he said.

Knowledge of the northern green anaconda's existence is important in and of itself, but the difference in male and female diets could also give clues about the health of the ecosystem — and the people who live in it, Fry said. Female northern green anacondas feed lower in the food chain than males do, preying on animals such as deer. The males eat more predatory fish and caimans, meaning they accumulate more toxins leftover in the environment from events like oil spills than females do, he said.

Male northern green anacondas' diet resembles that of humans living in the Amazon. Therefore, the concentration of toxins in these anacondas provides an estimate of the pollution that people are exposed to — and that pollution is high, Fry said.

"The concentrations of the heavy metals cadmium and lead, potent endocrine disruptors that are the signature of oil spills, were over 1000 percent higher in males than females," he said. "That is not a subtle difference. That is a warning flare."

In light of these findings, Fry is developing a wild food guide for the Waorani. "Recommendations will include pregnant women and young children avoiding top-level predators likely to carry higher contaminant loads, such as arapaima and arowana [two types of predatory freshwater fish]," he said.

"Pole to Pole with Will Smith" premieres Jan. 13 on National Geographic, and Jan. 14 on Disney+ and Hulu.

How to watch "Pole to Pole with Will Smith" in the U.S.

"Pole to Pole with Will Smith" premieres in the U.S. on National Geographic and will be available to stream on Disney+.

The first two episodes will air from 9 p.m. ET / 6 p.m. PT on Tuesday Jan. 13 on TV. Then, on Jan. 14, all seven episodes will be available to stream in one go on Disney+.

How to watch "Pole to Pole with Will Smith" in the U.K.

"Pole to Pole with Will Smith" will also air on the National Geographic TV channel and the Disney+ streaming platform in the U.K.

The premiere is a day later than the U.S. release, landing on Jan. 14 at 8 p.m. GMT. All seven episodes will be available to stream on Disney+ for U.K. subscribers from Jan. 14.

Watch "Pole to Pole with Will Smith" from anywhere

If you're travelling abroad you can access your usual streaming services from anywhere, thanks to a VPN.

A VPN, or virtual private network, is a piece of internet security software that can alter your device's digital location, unlocking the geo-restrictions on most streaming platforms.

Our expert colleagues at TechRadar rate NordVPN as the best VPN. Not only is it great for unblocking streaming services, it has top-level security features, a reasonable price tag and, right now, a big discount.

We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example: 1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service). 2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad. We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.

1. Until the 1960s, researchers thought people largely dreamed in black and white.

2. Pumpkins are a type of berry (and a very big one).

3. Evacuating your bowels stimulates the vagus nerve, which can lower your blood pressure and heart rate — no wonder it feels so good to poop.

4. Iceland used to be the only country in the world without mosquitoes, but that changed in October 2025.

5. If a human could fly with wings, they would need to have a wingspan of about 20 feet (6 m) to have any chance of gliding through the air.

6. Leaving the pit in doesn't technically delay the browning process of an entire avocado; it just prevents oxygen from browning the bit underneath it.

7. At about 1,300 feet (400 m) below sea level, the banks of the Dead Sea are Earth's lowest point on dry land.

8. During the adolescent growth spurt, some teenagers can grow as much as 4 to 5 inches (10 to 13 centimeters) in a single year.

9. Black holes are dark because they trap light that crosses the event horizon, which means if you were to enter one, it would actually be extremely bright.

10. Your brain can take 15 to 30 minutes to reach full cognitive capacity after you wake up, a period known as "sleep inertia."

11. When sea levels were lower during the last ice age, North America and Asia were joined by an enormous land bridge. A similar bridge enabled the ancestors of Tyrannosaurus rex to trek from Asia to North America around 68 million years ago.

12. The slowest-moving land animal is likely the banana slug, which moves at the extremely leisurely pace of 0.006 mph (0.0096 km/h), or a tenth of an inch per second (2.7 millimeters per second). By comparison, the common garden snail glides along at a relatively speedy 0.03 mph (0.048 km/h), or half an inch per second (1.3 centimeters per second).

13. Although rare, in certain circumstances, women were allowed to compete as gladiators in ancient Rome, but there are no records of any of them dying in battle.

14. The sound of the supermassive black holes in the Perseus cluster burping out gas would hit a low B flat, some 57 octaves below middle C.

15. All newts are salamanders, but not all salamanders are newts.

16. Even though the Colorado River toad releases the chemical 5-MeO-DMT — one of the most potent psychedelics around — from poison glands in its head, you can't get high by licking it.

17. The 1883 eruption of Krakatau is often considered the loudest sound in history, with people 1,900 miles (3,000 kilometers) away hearing the blast.

18. The oldest known human in the genus Homo lived in Africa around 2.8 million years ago, but we're not sure which species it is.

19. The largest known prime number contains 41,024,320 digits.

20. Frogs breathe and drink through their skin.

21. A bullet fired from a 223 Remington leaves the weapon at up to 2,727 mph (4,390 km/h) — fast enough to cover 11 football fields in a single second.

22. A turtle's shell is made of 50 bones.

23. Despite what you may have seen in the movies, ancient Egyptians did not booby-trap the pyramids.

24. The world's longest undersea section of a tunnel belongs to the Channel Tunnel, which has a 23.5-mile (37.9 kilometers) underwater section connecting England and France.

25. Despite evidence to the contrary, Christopher Columbus continued to claim the lands he "discovered" were parts of Asia, likely so he'd get paid.

26. The primary mirror on the James Webb Space Telescope is 21.3 feet (6.5 meters) in diameter, giving it a total collecting area of more than 270 square feet (25 square m).

27. As of March 2025, there were 953 known natural satellites in the solar system (depending on your definition of a moon).

28. There are roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in the observable universe.

29. It takes five to 10 years for a body in a coffin to completely decompose down to a skeleton.

30. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is a web of ocean currents that loop through the Atlantic Ocean, moving 600 million cubic feet (17 million cubic meters) of water per second and 1.2 petawatts of heat — roughly the same amount of heat put out by a million power plants running at the same time.

31. The deepest place on Earth is the bottom of the Mariana Trench, which lies about 35,876 feet (10,935 meters) below the surface. That makes it about 7,000 feet (2,100 m) deeper than Mount Everest is tall.

32. Researchers have shown that octopuses can be fooled by a version of the "rubber hand illusion," by stroking a real octopus arm hidden from view and a visible fake octopus arm at the same time. When the fake arm was pinched, the octopus reacted as if its own arm had been attacked — by changing color or pulling back.

33. The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs hit Earth at 27,000 mph (43,000 km/h).

34. Roughly half of all eukaryotic species on Earth are insects.

35. Mount Everest is only the tallest mountain by altitude, at 29,031.69 feet (8,848.86 m) above sea level. If you measure Mauna Kea, an inactive volcano in Hawaii, from base to peak, it's actually taller, at 33,497 feet (10,211 m) in altitude.

36. You're more likely to cry when chopping an onion with a dull knife than with a sharp one.

37. Antarctica became a continent around 34 million years ago, after losing its land connections with Australia and South America.

38. Jellyfish, sea anemones and hydras don't have brains, yet they're capable of surprisingly advanced behavior.

39. Kangaroos have three vaginas.

40. Many shark species will become temporarily paralyzed if you turn them upside down.

41. The human heart has incredible stamina, beating around 100,000 times and pumping roughly 2,500 gallons (9,500 liters) of blood daily, on average.

42. Dragonflies are one of nature's most effective hunters, catching prey up to 97% of the time. By comparison, tigers have a success rate of only 10%.

43. Yes, some figs really do have wasps in them.

44. Training OpenAI's GPT-4 used an estimated 50 gigawatt-hours of energy — enough to power San Francisco for three days.

45. The oldest DNA sequenced from animals and plants is from 2.4 million years ago.

46. On average, a person produces about 30 to 91 cubic inches (500 to 1,500 cubic centimeters) of gas every day, regardless of their diet. Thankfully, over 99% of those gases are odorless.

47. A female puff adder holds the record for the most offspring born in one live-birth pregnancy — a whopping 156 fully developed snakelets.

48. The record for the most times a piece of paper has been folded in half is 12. If you were to fold it 42 times, it would be more than 273,280 miles (439,800 kilometers) high — more than the average distance between Earth and the moon.

49. It is possible to turn a different element into gold, just not a lot of it.

50. The most-cited number of organs in the human body is 78, and the heaviest organ is the skin.

Looking for more mysteries?

Here are some more incredible stories from Life's Little Mysteries:

—Do humans and chimps really share nearly 99% of their DNA?

—Why do European cities have milder winters than those in North America, despite being at the same latitude?

—Why does boiling water have bubbles, except in a microwave?

Yet, our picture of how this dinosaur looked and lived has changed markedly thanks to more than a century of scientific discoveries. Think you know everything there is to know about the king of the dinosaurs? Well, start the quiz below to find out if your knowledge is dino-mite or a faded fossil.

Remember to log in to put your name on the leaderboard; hints are available if you click the yellow button!

Editor's note: This article was updated on Jan. 8 at 5:00 a.m. ET to correct a conversion in a question answer.

More science quizzes

• Crocodile quiz: Test your knowledge on the prehistoric predators
• Animal quiz: Test yourself on these fun animal trivia questions
• Shark quiz: How much do you know about these iconic ocean superstars?

The answer is more complicated than it might seem. According to Leslie A. Lyons, a cat geneticist at the University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine, most cat breeds developed in the past 140 years as a result of human selection for specific physical traits.

However, a select few are known as "natural" cat breeds because they are derived from a population of cats that evolved due to factors in their natural environments over thousands of years. These natural cat breeds include some of the most beloved breeds today, such as Maine coons, Siberians, Russian blues, Norwegian forest cats, Turkish Vans and Egyptian maus.

According to Sarah Hartwell, a cat genetics hobbyist and founder of the cat resource MessyBeast, the progenitors of natural breeds form under the same conditions as wild species do.

"Natural breeds could be considered a step along the road to speciation," she told Live Science. In most cases, they form as a result of environmental adaptation. In Western Russia, cold and snowy conditions favored thick-furred, big-boned cats that became the foundation of the Siberian forest cat breed. In Southeast Asia and the coastal areas of the Indian Ocean, warm and humid conditions favored short-haired, slender-bodied, big-eared cats that set the stage for the Abyssinian.

In some cases, natural breeds begin as a result of geographic isolation. This phenomenon, known as the founder effect, occurs when a gene that is not advantageous to the animals' survival spreads because the population has a small, isolated gene pool. On the Isle of Man (a self-governing British Crown Dependency in the Irish Sea), a mutation that caused a short tail spread as a result of inbreeding, resulting in the ancestors of the Manx cat. Unfortunately, Manx cats can suffer from spinal defects due to this tail mutation.

Although the ancestors of natural breeds evolved under natural conditions, modern-day cats of these breeds are not so "natural" anymore.

"All breeds, no matter what species, have human influence," Lyons told Live Science. According to a study in the journal Animal Genetics that she co-authored, the selective breeding of cats has increased exponentially in the past century, which, in turn, has removed the environmental pressures that shaped natural breeds.

The Manx breed, for example, likely would have died out naturally due to a lack of genetic diversity and the detrimental effects of the short-tail mutation. In the modern day, the breed is still widespread as a result of intentional breeding by humans. However, there are some who are trying to eliminate it.

"The thought is to retire this breed, or find a way to make them healthier," Lyons told Live Science. "Maybe we [work toward] a tailed Manx."

Some of the once-natural breeds are more closely connected to their roots than others are. Modern Siberian cats, for example, are genetically and physically similar to their ancestors because breeders regularly bring in new cats, found as strays or as pets in the breed's home region, to add to breeding programs.

Other breeds have been altered both genetically and physically from their original appearance. Russian blues, for example, were crossbred with Siamese cats to prevent the breed's extinction after World War II, and breeders have since divided them into specific "types" that look different from the original cats.

So yes, "natural" cat breeds do exist, but they are not entirely natural. The traits that are quintessential of a Maine coon purchased from a breeder — such as large size, square jaw, and often feet with six or more toes — may resemble the Maine coons discovered back in the 1800s, but they have been preserved — and, in some cases, exaggerated — through artificial selection.

"It all depends on popularity and what people prefer," Lyons told Live Science. "One lineage of cats might become very popular and change what the breed looks like, and then it might swing back another direction depending on the next new craze."

Cat quiz: Can you get a purr-fect score?

The dinosaur, Ahshislesaurus wimani, likely had a flat head and a bony crest low on its snout, researchers revealed in a study. The findings, which is due to be published in the Bulletin of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, suggest that duck-billed dinosaurs, or hadrosaurids, were more diverse and overlapping during the last 20 million years of the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago) than previously thought.

Hadrosaurids were large, plant-eating dinosaurs that lived during the last 24 million years of the Cretaceous. They have "sometimes been colorfully called 'the cows of the Cretaceous,'" study co-author Steven Jasinski, a paleontologist at the Harrisburg University of Science and Technology in Pennsylvania, said in a statement. "While this may not be a perfect metaphor, they likely were living in herds and would have been conspicuously present in the environments of northern New Mexico near the end of the Cretaceous."

According to the statement, A. wimani could potentially have grown up to 40 feet (12 meters) long.

One set of A. wimani fossils discovered in 1916 were previously identified as a member of the hadrosaurid genus Kritosaurus. But existing fossil specimens are frequently being reevaluated as more data and fossils become available.

In the new study, the researchers revisited that set of fossils — including an incomplete skull, lower jawbone, and several vertebrae — from the Kirtland Formation in New Mexico. The fossils were housed at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

"As a general rule … skulls are really the basis for identifying differences in animals," study co-author Anthony Fiorillo, the executive director of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, said in a separate statement. "When you have a skull and you're noticing differences, that carries more weight than, say, you found a toe bone that looks different from that toe bone."

By comparing the skull to those of other hadrosaurids, the team found that its shape and features were distinct enough from other hadrosaurid skulls to suggest it was likely a different species. A. wimani is closely related to Kritosaurus, suggesting that their evolutionary lines had split not long before.

"Kritosaurus is still a valid genus with species of its own," study co-author Edward Malinzak, a paleontologist at Penn State University Lehigh Valley, said in the second statement. "We took a specimen that was lumped in as an individual of Kritosaurus and determined it had significantly distinct anatomical features to warrant being its own genus and species."

It's not clear yet how the related species co-existed in the same environment, the researchers wrote in the study. But tracing the history and extent of different species could help scientists understand the environment they lived in, as well as the evolutionary history of duck-billed dinosaurs.

"The lineages appear to have co-existed in the region for a time," Malinzak said. "It showed that this group not only exploded with diversity across the continent at one point, but also contributed to the world-wide spread of this group in the Late Cretaceous."

The shift has largely been attributed to the reintroduction of wolves to the park — as predators, they helped control the elk numbers. But their return may not have reshaped the entire ecosystem in the way that scientists thought, and has sparked a fierce debate among scientists over exactly why and how Yellowstone has rebounded.

According to a study published in January, the reintroduction of gray wolves (Canis lupus) in the 1990s created a trophic cascade — a chain reaction in the food web — that benefitted the entire ecosystem. The study linked wolves in the area to a reduction in the elk population, which in turn reduced browsing and allowed willow trees to grow. Between 2001 and 2020, this led to a 1,500% increase in crown volume, the total space filled by upper branches of the willows.

But now, scientists have written a response letter to the editor, published in Oct. 13 in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation, in which they argue that the original study's methodology was flawed, and that Yellowstone wolves' effect on willow shrubs is not so clear.

Large predators were targeted in Yellowstone from the end of the 1800s. By the 1920s, wolves were largely extinct from the park. Their disappearance created an ecological imbalance — the elk population exploded, which decimated plant populations and in turn threatened beavers, among other impacts. This is known as a trophic cascade, where the removal of one species causes ripples throughout the food web.

While the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone has led to changes within the park, the authors of the response letter claim the original study reinterpreted existing data to fit an oversimplified story.

The study converted willow height measurements collected and published by another research group into a metric called crown volume, response author Daniel MacNulty, a wildlife ecologist at Utah State University, told Live Science in an email. Crown volume was used as a proxy for willow size, meant to capture the shrub’s entire three-dimensional growth more than simply measuring its height.

"Because crown volume was built directly from height, [the study] only showed that height predicts height," MacNulty said. "They did not reveal anything new about how willow growth changed after wolf reintroduction."

The response letter suggests other inconsistencies in data analysis, like comparing willow measurements from different locations across years. This is problematic because it shows a misleading time series of willow growth, and MacNulty's research group has previously published research noting sampling biases in other studies supporting this same trophic cascade theory.

"There is substantial scientific evidence of a definitive effect of wolf recovery on the rest of the Yellowstone ecosystem," MacNulty said, like wolves increasing the supply of carrion to bears, coyotes, eagles and other meat-eating species. But the effect of wolves on vegetation is less clear because it operates through the decline of elk populations, which wolves were likely not solely responsible for. As MacNulty points out, humans, grizzly bears and cougars also hunt elk. "A major problem with the simple trophic cascade story is that it ignores the role of these other predators."

William Ripple, an Oregon State University wildlife ecologist and author of the original paper, stands by the original conclusions of the paper, maintaining that a large carnivore, elk, and willow trophic cascade occurred in Yellowstone. "Our methods are sound, the modeling approach is standard," Ripple told Live Science in an email. "So we reject the idea that there are fatal flaws."

The debate about Yellowstone wolves and the impact of their reintroduction goes beyond this study and the latest response. While scientists widely agree that there is a trophic cascade in Yellowstone, its strength — and which predators are most responsible for it — form the center of the disagreement, MacNulty said.

Some scientists argue the story is more complex. "There are reasons other than trophic cascades by which carnivores and plants can be positively associated," Jake Goheen, a wildlife ecologist at Iowa State University told Live Science in an email. Goheen, who was not involved in the research or response, said he doesn't believe that the authors of the original study provided enough evidence to support their conclusion that reintroducing wolves in Yellowstone caused a strong trophic cascade that affected willows.

"There is a growing body of literature at this point that has scrutinized the hypothesized cascade in Yellowstone," Goheen said. He adds that this does not mean there's no wolf-to-elk-to-willow trophic cascade in Yellowstone, only that the evidence presented so far is not clear enough.

To establish a clear trophic cascade from Yellowstone wolf reintroduction to willows, researchers would need to account for other predators and herbivores, said MacNulty. The ideal study would then analyze how much more total willow biomass there is now compared with before wolf introduction, to identify the strength of the effect; then calculate how much of that increase can be attributed solely to wolves, to identify its cause.

Ripple and his research team are now preparing a detailed reply, which explains that criticisms of the original study come from misunderstandings of what they did, Ripple said. "The basic scientific logic of the paper is solid," Ripple said.

Conservation priorities might be fueling the controversy over large carnivores' beneficial effects on ecosystems, said Goheen, adding that even if wolves are not definitively causing a trophic cascade to willows, they are still important to conserve.

In recent months, orcas (Orcinus orca) have also been spotted abducting baby pilot whales and tearing open sharks to feast on their livers. And off the coast of Spain and Portugal, a small population of orcas has begun ramming and sinking boats.

All of these incidents show just how clever these apex predators are.

"These are animals with an incredibly complex and highly evolved brain," Deborah Giles, an orca researcher at the University of Washington and the nonprofit Wild Orca, told Live Science. "They've got parts of their brain that are associated with memory and emotion that are significantly more developed than even in the human brain."

But the scale and novelty of recent attacks have raised a question: Are orcas getting smarter? And if so, what's driving this shift?

It's not likely that orcas' brains are changing on an anatomical level, said Josh McInnes, a marine ecologist who studies orcas at the University of British Columbia. "Behavioral change can influence anatomical change in an animal or a population" — but only over thousands of years of evolution, McInnes told Live Science.

Related: Scientists investigate mysterious case of orca that swallowed 7 sea otters whole

But orcas are fast learners, which means they can and do teach each other some terrifying tricks, and thus become "smarter" as a group. Still, some of these seemingly new tricks may in fact be age-old behaviors that humans are only documenting now. And just like in humans, some of these learned behaviors become trends, ebbing and flowing in social waves.

Frequent interactions with humans through boat traffic and fishing activities may also drive orcas to learn new behaviors. And the more their environment shifts, the faster orcas must respond and rely on social learning to persist.

Teaching hunting strategies 

There's no question that orcas learn from each other. Many of the skills these animals teach and share relate to their role as highly evolved apex predators.

Scientists described orcas killing and eating blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus) for the first time in a study published last year. In the months and years that followed the first attack in March 2019, orcas preyed on a blue whale calf and juvenile in two additional incidents, pushing the young blue whales below the surface to suffocate them.

This newly documented hunting behavior is an example of social learning, with strategies being shared and passed on from adult orcas to their young, Robert Pitman, a marine ecologist at Oregon State University's Marine Mammal Institute, told Live Science in an email. "Anything the adults learn will be passed along" from the dominant female in a pod to her offspring, he said.

Taking down a blue whale "requires cooperation and coordination," Pitman said. Orcas may have learned and refined the skills needed to tackle such enormous prey in response to the recovery of whale populations from whaling. This know-how was then passed on, until the orcas became highly skilled at hunting even the largest animal on Earth, Pitman said.

Old tricks, new observations 

Some of the gory behaviors researchers have observed recently may actually be long-standing habits.

For instance, during the blue whale attacks, observers noted that the orcas inserted their heads inside live whales' mouths to feed on their tongues. But this is probably not a new behavior — just a case of humans finally seeing it up close.

"Killer whales are like humans in that they have their 'preferred cuts of meat,'" Pitman said. "When preying on large whales, they almost always take the tongue first, and sometimes that is all they will feed on."

Tongue is not the only delicacy orcas seek out. Off the coast of South Africa, two males — nicknamed Port and Starboard — have, for several years, been killing sharks to extract their livers.

Although the behavior surprised researchers at first, it's unlikely that orcas picked up liver-eating recently due to social learning, Michael Weiss, a behavioral ecologist and research director at the Center for Whale Research in Washington state, told Live Science.

Related: Orcas attacked a great white shark to gorge on its liver in Australia, shredded carcass suggests

That's because, this year, scientists also captured footage of orcas slurping down the liver of a whale shark off the coast of Baja California, Mexico. The likelihood that Port and Starboard transferred their know-how across thousands of miles of ocean is vanishingly small, meaning liver-eating is probably a widespread and established behavior.

"Because there are more cameras and more boats, we're starting to see these behaviors that we hadn't seen before," Weiss said.

Sharing scavenging techniques 

Orcas master and share more than hunting secrets. Several populations worldwide have learned to poach fish caught for human consumption from the longlines used in commercial fisheries and have passed on this information.

In the southern Indian Ocean, around the Crozet Islands, two orca populations have increasingly scavenged off longlines since fishing in the region expanded in the 1990s. By 2018, the entire population of orcas in these waters had taught one another to feast on longline buffets, with whole groups that previously foraged on seals and penguins developing a taste for human-caught toothfish.

Sometimes, orcas' ability to quickly learn new behaviors can have fatal consequences. In Alaska, orcas recently started dining on groundfish caught by bottom trawlers, but many end up entangled and dead in fishing gear.

"This behavior may be being shared between individuals, and that's maybe why we're seeing an increase in some of these mortality events," McInnes said.

Playing macabre games 

Orcas' impressive cognitive abilities also extend to playtime.

Giles and her colleagues study an endangered population of salmon-eating orcas off the North Pacific coast. Called the Southern Resident population, these killer whales don't eat mammals. But over the past 60 years, they have developed a unique game in which they seek out young porpoises, with the umbilical cords sometimes still attached, and play with them to death.

Related: 'An enormous mass of flesh armed with teeth': How orcas gained their 'killer' reputation

There are 78 recorded incidents of these orcas tossing porpoises to one another like a ball but not a single documented case of them eating the small mammals, Giles said. "In some cases, you'll see teeth marks where the [killer] whale was clearly gently holding the animal, but the animal was trying to swim away, so it's scraping the skin."

The researchers think these games could be a lesson for young orcas on how to hunt salmon, which are roughly the same size as baby porpoises. "Sometimes they'll let the porpoise swim off, pause, and then go after it," Giles said.

Are humans driving orcas to become "smarter"? 

Humans may indirectly be driving orcas to become smarter, by changing ocean conditions, McInnes said. Orca raids on longline and trawl fisheries show, for example, that they innovate and learn new tricks in response to human presence in the sea.

Human-caused climate change may also force orcas to rely more heavily on one another for learning.

In Antarctica, for instance, a population of orcas typically preys on Weddell seals (Leptonychotes weddellii) by washing them off ice floes. But as the ice melts, they are adapting their hunting techniques to catch leopard seals (Hydrurga leptonyx) and crabeater seals (Lobodon carcinophaga) — two species that don't rely on ice floes as much and are "a little bit more feisty," requiring orcas to develop new skills, McInnes said.

While human behaviors can catalyze new learning in orcas, in some cases we have also damaged the bonds that underpin social learning. Overfishing of salmon off the coast of Washington, for example, has dissolved the social glue that keeps orca populations together.

"Their social bonds get weaker because you can't be in a big partying killer-whale group if you're all hungry and trying to search for food," Weiss said. As orca groups splinter and shrink, so does the chance to learn from one another and adapt to their rapidly changing ecosystem, Weiss said.

And while orcas probably don't know that humans are to blame for changes in their ocean habitat, they are "acutely aware that humans are there," McInnes said.

Luckily for us, he added, orcas don't seem interested in training their deadly skills on us.

Primates don't just live in lots of places; there are also hundreds of species and subspecies. In fact, the order primates is the fourth most biodiverse mammal order in the animal kingdom — yet the majority (62.6%) of primates are threatened with extinction.

Scientists researching primates, called "primatologists," have learned a lot over the years about our closest evolutionary relatives. For example, did you know that chimps have opposable big toes, or that not all monkeys can swing through the trees? Or even that there are some primates that are neither monkeys nor apes?

Fancy yourself a primatologist? Put your knowledge to the test below!

Remember to log in to put your name on the leaderboard; hints are available if you click the yellow button. Good luck!

More science quizzes

• Bird quiz: How much do you know about our feathered friends?
• Big cats quiz: Can you get the lion's share of these questions right?
• Snake quiz: How much do you know about the slithering reptiles?

In late December 1985, a worker opened the door to a remote cabin in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda and encountered a horrific scene: Gorilla researcher Dian Fossey, whose aggressive approach to conservation had pitted her against the local community, had been hacked to death with a machete, and her cabin had been ransacked.

Fossey had been working with an endangered gorilla population in Rwanda's Volcanoes National Park since the late 1960s. Along with Jane Goodall and Biruté Galdikas, she was one of the three "trimates" chosen by Louis Leakey to study primates in their natural habitat.

Fossey had no formal training in ethology, the science of animal behavior, when she set out for Africa. She began her field work in Kabara, Congo, living in a tiny tent and venturing out to study mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) there. After civil war broke out in 1967, she escaped to the Rwandan portion of the mountains and set up a new research project near Mount Karisimbi in Rwanda.

Fossey was inspired by the work of George Schaller, a biologist who, in 1959, had also studied the gorillas of the Virunga Mountains.

"I knew that animals try to stay out of your way. If you go quietly near them, they come to accept your presence. That's what I did with gorillas. I just went near them day after day, which was fairly easy because they form cohesive social groups. Soon, I knew them as individuals, both their faces and their behavior, and I just sat and watched them," Schaller said in a 2006 interview.

Fossey operated on this same principle of patient, unobtrusive observation. Still, the gorillas initially fled from her, and she spent hours tracking and trailing them across the misty forest.

After a year, they stopped fleeing at her presence and started beating their chests and vocalizing. It was a bluff meant to scare her off, but it was still far from their ordinary, natural behavior, she said in a 1973 lecture. After two years, she received two young gorillas, Coco and Pucker; rehabilitated them; and learned about gorilla young by observing them.

"I came to know the gorillas' need for love and affection, and the young gorillas' need for constant play," she said.

It would take three years before the gorillas came to accept her presence and reveal more naturalistic behavior, she said in the lecture.

During her decades in Virunga, Fossey described and learned to mimic the vocalizations of gorillas, including the "belch vocalization" that signifies contentment. She also elucidated their tight-knit family structures, courtship and mating rituals, as well as documented the occasional murder of infant gorillas by rival males.

Although she would eventually earn her doctorate in zoology from the University of Cambridge, Fossey spent her first years studying the gorillas with no formal training. Perhaps because of her initial lack of training, she formed close bonds with individual animals and tended to ascribe more humanlike motivations and descriptions to their actions than is typically accepted in formal zoology. She often described gorillas as more altruistic than humans.

"You take these fine, regal animals,'' she told an interviewer, as reported by The New York Times. ''How many fathers have the same sense of paternity? How many human mothers are more caring? The family structure is unbelievably strong.''

She formed a particularly close bond with a gorilla she nicknamed Digit — so named for his damaged finger — who did not have playmates his age. Digit was killed by poachers in 1977.

The last years of Fossey's life were increasingly focused on conserving the gorillas' dwindling habitat and combating poachers. She used confrontational methods, such as burning snares, wearing masks to scare poachers, and spray-painting cattle to prevent herders from bringing them into the national park, according to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.

She also shot over the heads of tourists to scare them away and told her graduate students to carry guns, according to The Washington Post.

Given that many of the people living on the fringes of the park lived in poverty and resorted to expansion and herding to survive, this did not earn her good will with many of the locals.

Fossey's murder was never solved. Many think poachers were responsible for the killing, but other theories have been floated as well.

Around 125 million years ago, a dinosaur longer than a pickup truck stalked rivers to gobble up fish in what is now Thailand.

The remains of the roughly 25-foot-long (7 to 8 meters) dinosaur, which include parts of its spine, pelvis and tail, represent one of the most complete spinosaurid specimens ever found in Asia, according to researchers.

Spinosaurids were a family of bipedal predators with elongated snouts, crocodile-like teeth and, in many species, sails on their backs. Researchers believe that the Thai specimen, first discovered in 2004, belonged to the Spinosaurinae subfamily, which included the longest-known carnivorous dinosaur genus, Spinosaurus — a potential swimming predator from North Africa that grew up to around 50 feet (15 m) long.

"This discovery from Thailand helps us better understand what spinosaurines looked like and how they evolved in Asia," Adun Samathi, an assistant professor at the Walai Rukhavej Botanical Research Institute and Mahasarakham University in Thailand, told Live Science in an email. "[The fossils] also show that dinosaur diversity in Southeast Asia was richer than previously known and expand our understanding of how these unusual fish-eating predators were spread around the world."

Samathi presented the spinosaurid findings Nov. 12 at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology 2025 annual meeting in Birmingham, England. The findings haven't been peer-reviewed, as Samathi and his colleagues still have to submit them to a journal.

The researchers don't have an official name for the dinosaur. However, they've nicknamed it the Sam Ran spinosaurid, as it was found in the Sam Ran locality (area) of the Khok Kruat rock formation in northeastern Thailand, according to Samathi, who studied the spinosaurid as part of his doctoral thesis. (Samathi is one of several students and researchers to study the specimen since its discovery.)

The team quickly identified the dinosaur as a spinosaurid because it has several of the group's characteristic features, including long neck vertebrae and tall spines on its back vertebrae. However, the species also had features that distinguished it from known spinosaurid species, including shorter spines than Spinosaurus and more paddle-like spines than Ichthyovenator from Loas, which borders Thailand.

The team suspects that the Sam Ran spinosaurid was more closely related to Spinosaurus from North Africa than Ichthyovenator from Laos. However, there's a lot of uncertainty surrounding the evolution of Asian spinosaurids, as well as spinosaurids in general, and the researchers' findings are only preliminary at this stage.

The Sam Ran spinosaurid died beside a shallow river before some of its remains were fossilized. Samathi doesn't think that this spinosaurid could swim, but it seemed to be using the river ecosystem, which was teeming with life when the dinosaur perished relatively early in the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago).

"The new spinosaur lived (or at least [was] found) in a river system with gently flowing water and occasional floods, within a dry to semi-arid landscape," Samathi said. "The site has yielded a variety of animals, including freshwater sharks, bony fish, turtles, crocodiles, and dinosaurs such as a sauropod and an iguanodontian."

Flat-headed cats (Prionailurus planiceps), named after their flattened foreheads, live in fragmented pockets across Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia, but they were feared extinct in Thailand.

Researchers rediscovered the cats using remote camera traps in Thailand’s Princess Sirindhorn Wildlife Sanctuary in 2024 and 2025 — the first detections in Thailand since 1995. Cat conservation organization Panthera announced the rediscovery on Friday (Dec. 26), which is also Thailand's annual Wildlife Protection Day.

"For decades, the flat-headed cat has been classified as 'likely extinct,' but after years of sustained protection, strong scientific partnerships, and community stewardship, we can now celebrate its return to Thailand this National Wildlife Day," Suchart Chomklin, Thailand's minister of Natural Resources and Environment, said in a statement.

Flat-headed cats have webbed feet to traverse wetland habitats, such as waterlogged peat-swamp forest, where the species is thought to primarily hunt fish. However, researchers know very little about their lives. The enigmatic cat is the smallest in Southeast Asia, weighing around 4.4 pounds (2 kilograms) — less than a domestic cat — and is scarcely seen by humans.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) last assessment of the species, carried out in 2014, concluded that flat-headed cats were endangered. They are primarily threatened by the loss and degradation of their wetlands and lowland forests, as well as other human pressures like overfishing and hunting.

Researchers went looking for the cats in remote areas of Thailand in what Panthera described as the "largest-ever survey of the species." The work is part of a new Panthera-led IUCN assessment of flat-headed cats, which Panthera expects to publish in early 2026.

The camera traps photographed several flat-headed cats, including a female with a cub, demonstrating that they are not only living in southern Thailand but also breeding in the region.

"Rediscovery of the flat-headed cat in southern Thailand is a significant win for conservation in Thailand and the broader southeast Asia region where the species is still found," Atthapol Charoenchansa, the director general of Thailand's Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation, said in the statement.

The Samoa Conservation Society's (SCS) latest field survey, which took place from Oct. 17-Nov. 13, reported five sightings of the manumea (Didunculus strigirostris). Previous surveys only yielded a single sighting, if any. The last photograph of the cryptic species in the wild was taken in 2013.

In the early 1990s, there were around 7,000 of these dodo-like birds, which are only found in Samoa. But habitat destruction, hunting and invasive species decimated the population to an estimated 50 to 150 as of 2024. Before setting out, team members were concerned they wouldn't find the bird alive, potentially signalling its impending extinction.

"That was our worry," said Moeumu Uili, a project coordinator focusing on manumea with SCS. "What happens if we can't find the bird? Does that mean the manumea is no more?"

Despite confirming the manumea's existence, the team found it difficult to photograph due to their distance from the bird, its quick movement and rainy conditions. "All of a sudden, it appears out of nowhere," Uili told Live Science. "When we see it through the binoculars, we can see the bird."

But by the time researchers lower their binoculars to get a camera, the bird is gone, she said.

Last of its kind

The manumea is the only living species of its Didunculus genus, which will end if the bird goes extinct. The chicken-size manumea's scientific name, Didunculus strigirostris, means "little dodo." Both the dodo and manumea are classified as island ground pigeons.

The dodo went extinct due to habitat loss, hunting and predators — the same threats to the manumea's survival. Hunting has been outlawed and subject to fines, so it's imperative to focus on the current main threat — invasive species, particularly feral cats and rats, experts said. Cats hunt living birds and chicks, while rats eat the eggs and chicks.

"The impact on manumea is certainly catastrophic," Joe Wood, the manager of International Conservation Programs at the Toledo Zoo, told Live Science. "It seems very likely that feral cats are a major cause of decline," said Wood, who also co-chairs a group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature that works on manumea conservation efforts. "There has to be some kind of control program."

Saving manumea

In this fall's latest survey, Uili's team focused on the remote coastal rainforest of Uafato, but manumea potentially live in six additional forests in Samoa. A current invasive species management program already exists in one of those forests, Samoa's Malololelei Recreation Reserve, Uili said. If there's funding, SCS wants to expand the invasive species management to areas like Uafato.

If a manumea is secured, the partners working to save it said they can use biobanking to preserve biological samples to establish cultured cell lines for the bird. These cell lines will allow them to study the manumea's genetic material and learn more about it. With more information, they can determine the best measures to take, such as potential captive breeding, to repopulate the species, experts said.

The nonprofit conservation arm of Colossal Biosciences is also supporting some manumea conservation efforts, for instance, by building an app to distinguish the manumea's call from another bird's in hopes of getting a more accurate estimate of the manumea's prevalence.

Colossal has said they have plans to bring dodos back from extinction. It recently made headlines for "de-extincting" dire wolves — essentially gene editing gray wolves to include a handful of traits that make them look more like dire wolves.

But there's a need to be wary of efforts to bring extinct species back into ecosystems that have changed since they were alive, Nic Rawlence, an associate professor and director of the Otago Palaeogenetics Laboratory in the Department of Zoology at the University of Otago in New Zealand, told Live Science.

Rawlence also said you must bring back enough species to ensure genetic diversity so they can adapt and survive, which is known as the 500-rule in conservation.

To save the manumea, Rawlence echoed Wood and stressed it's crucial to stop invasive species and other threats to the manumea's survival without many left.

"I think it's still going to come down to the grunt work of predator control, habitat restoration, translocation," he said.

Manumea conservation work in Samoa is supported by SCS, the Samoa Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, BirdLife International, the Colossal Foundation, the Toledo Zoo, and the Waddesdon Foundation through the Zoological Society of London.

Editor's Note: This story was produced in partnership with the Fellowship in Journalism and Health Impact through the University of Toronto Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

The new research reveals "cats' ability to categorize bonded individuals and modulate their responses," said study co-author Kaan Kerman, principal investigator of the Animal Behavior and Human-animal Interactions Research Group at Bilkent University in Turkey. "This shows that cats are not automata and possess cognitive abilities that enable them to live alongside humans in an adaptive manner," he told Live Science in an email.

Despite their reputation for being aloof and unfriendly, cats are actually highly communicative and masters at fitting into different social groups.

"Both the public imagination and the scientific community for a time viewed cats as loners with little need for social bonds," Kerman said. However, "cats are more social than previously assumed. They do not interact with humans solely to obtain food. They actively seek social contact and form bonds with their caregivers."

Greeting is a key part of that sociability, as it helps reinforce bonds between domestic cats (Felis catus) and their humans, the researchers wrote in the study, which was published Nov. 14 in the journal Ethology.

To find out more about how cats greet humans, the researchers fitted 40 cat owners with cameras. They were asked to film the first 100 seconds of their interactions with their cat after returning home. The participants were told to act normally so they could capture typical interactions. The researchers then analyzed the footage to assess whether certain behaviors are related, and whether different demographic variables influenced the cats' behaviors.

Nine people were excluded from the study for various reasons, but videos from the remaining 31 participants revealed that the cats were far more vocal toward men than women when their humans first walked in. "No other demographic factor had a discernible effect on the frequency or duration of greetings," the researchers wrote.

The researchers then accounted for different factors, such as the animals' sex, pedigree status and number of cats in the household — but found that the sex of the human was the only significant influence on cat vocalizations.

The researchers suggest this could be because women are typically more verbally active with their cats and better at interpreting what their cats want. Men, on the other hand, may need a lot more prompting before they pay sufficient attention to their cats, the researchers hypothesized in the study.

The team also speculate that cultural factors may have influenced their findings. Previous research shows that people in different cultures interact with cats in different ways — and that this also impacts how cats interact with humans. In this case, the participants were in Turkey, and it may be that men in Turkey are less likely to be chatty with their cats, the team wrote. "However, this interpretation remains speculative and warrants further exploration in future research," the team wrote.

The team also found that meowing and other vocalizations didn't fit into a specific pattern of behavior — meaning these vocalizations were not a sign of a specific emotional state or need.

The team acknowledged that the study has several limitations, including the small sample size and the participants being from the same region. The researchers also noted that the study did not control for other potentially important factors, such as how hungry the cats were when their humans returned, the number of other people in the household or the length of time the animals were alone. Previous research suggested that cats react differently to humans — such as by purring and stretching more — when they are separated for longer periods of time, so the results don't necessarily reveal that cats always meow more at men.

"One important next step is to replicate the findings in different cultural contexts. This would help us understand how generalizable the results are," Kerman said.

Dennis Turner, director of the Institute for Applied Ethology and Animal Psychology in Switzerland who was not involved in the study, said he was impressed by the team's findings.

"I liked the authors' speculation about the reason for this finding and suspect that the men either were less attentive to the cats' vocalizations on other occasions or reacted differently (more or less strongly, different voice frequency) to the greeting vocalizations than women," he told Live Science in an email.

"Much of my team's research [h]as shown that men and women (and children) interact differently with cats in the household." For instance, women speak more to cats and are likelier to go down to the cats' level to interact with them, he noted.

However, cats likely have no preference towards men or women, Turner added. Instead, he agreed with the researchers' view that more meowing toward men is a sign of cats' social flexibility.

Cat quiz: Can you get a purr-fect score?

The pumas in question reestablished themselves in an Argentinian national park that housed a penguin breeding colony — and the cats promptly began eating the birds. Now, it turns out the normally solitary cats that eat the penguins are tolerating each other more often than expected, new research published Wednesday (Dec. 17) in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B reports.

The findings suggest that reintroductions like these can have surprising knock-on effects.

"Restoring wildlife in today's changed landscapes doesn't simply rewind ecosystems to the past," said study co-author Mitchell Serota, an ecologist at Duke Farms in New Jersey. "It can create entirely new interactions that reshape animal behavior and populations in unexpected ways."

Sheep ranchers in Patagonia forced pumas out of the region in the 20th century. After Monte Leon National Park was established in 2004, pumas have started making their way back. But in the pumas' absence, other species had adapted to the reduced hunting pressure. For example, a group of Magellanic penguins (Spheniscus magellanicus), usually confined to offshore islands, established a mainland breeding colony consisting of some 40,000 breeding pairs.

Shortly after the park was established, researchers started noticing penguin remains in puma scat. The pumas were taking advantage of the changed ecosystem.

"We thought it was just a couple individuals that were doing this," said Serota, who conducted the research while he was a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley. "But when we got there … we noticed a ton of puma detections near the penguin colony."

In the new study, researchers used cameras to estimate how many pumas lived near the penguin breeding colony, a 1.2 mile (2 kilometers) stretch of beach inside the national park. They also tracked 14 individual pumas with GPS collars and investigated penguin kill sites across several field seasons between 2019 and 2023. Nine of the pumas they tracked hunted penguins, while five did not.

Pumas that ate penguins had bigger variation in their ranges from season to season, the study found. The penguin-eating cats stuck close to the penguin colony when the birds were in the national park during breeding season. But they ranged about twice as far when the birds migrated offshore during the summer.

Penguin-eating pumas also interacted with each other more often than pumas who relied on other prey. The researchers documented 254 encounters between any two of the pumas who both ate penguins, and just four encounters between pumas where neither ate penguins. Most meetings between pumas occurred within 0.6 miles (1 km) of the penguin colony.

Because multiple pumas were using the colony as a food source, this disparity suggests that penguin-eating pumas tolerate other pumas better than those that rely on other prey, likely because they don't have to compete as much for the plentiful food. In fact, the researchers found that the density of pumas within the park was more than twice the highest previously-recorded concentration within Argentina. Usually, adult pumas are solitary and establish large ranges to ensure they have enough prey to feed themselves and their kittens.

Understanding how large carnivores behave when they return to ecosystems impacted by humans "is essential for conservation planning because it allows managers to … design management strategies that are grounded in how ecosystems actually function today, not how we assume they should function based on the past," Juan Ignacio Zanon Martinez, a population ecologist at Argentina's National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email to Live Science.

Knowing how the pumas' behavior affects both the cats and the penguins could aid future conservation efforts in the park.

For example, puma predation might not have a big effect on large breeding colonies, but it could affect the growth of new, smaller colonies. It's a "complex situation for the people who do the management of the area, because you have two native [species] interacting," in a way that's different from before human activities changed the ecosystem, said Javier Ciancio, a biologist at CONICET who was not involved in the new study.

In future work, Serota says the team will investigate how the relationship between pumas and penguins affects pumas' other prey, such as the guanaco (Lama guanicoe), a relative of the llama.

The species is struggling in the face of a changing global climate. Global sea ice levels dropped to a record low in February, and the warming planet is pushing up sea levels. These changes threaten polar bears, which live and hunt on the shrinking ice sheets.

But a group of polar bears (Ursus maritimus) in southern Greenland may be evolving to cope with their challenging environment. Researchers have found a link between changes in polar bear DNA and rising temperatures.

The study, published Dec. 12 in the journal Mobile DNA, "shows, for the first time, that a unique group of polar bears in the warmest part of Greenland are using 'jumping genes' to rapidly rewrite their own DNA, which might be a desperate survival mechanism against melting sea ice," lead author Alice Godden, a senior research associate at the University of Anglia in the U.K., said in a statement.

Jumping genes, also known as transposons or transposable elements, are pieces of DNA that move from one location on the genome to another. Depending on where they insert themselves into the organism's genetic code, transposons can change how other genes are expressed. More than one-third of the polar bear genome is made up of transposable elements, while in plants it can be as much as 70%. By contrast, transposons make up about 45% of the human genome.

Transposons appear to be helping polar bears adapt to climate change, the authors of the new study argue.

A 2022 study published in journal Science described an isolated population of polar bears in southern Greenland that was less reliant on sea ice. The group split from a community of bears in northern Greenland about 200 years ago, and their DNA was different from that of bears in the North. The new research builds on these earlier findings.

The researchers analyzed the DNA of 17 adult polar bears in Greenland — 12 from the cooler northeast and five from the group in the warmer southeast. They compared transposon activity in the two populations, and then linked that with climate data.

In the Southeastern population, there were changes to genes linked to heat stress, aging, and metabolism, as well as fat processing, which is important when food is scarce. According to the study, this suggests the bears "might be adjusting to their warmer conditions."

"By comparing these bears' active genes to local climate data, we found that rising temperatures appear to be driving a dramatic increase in the activity of jumping genes within the southeastern Greenland bears' DNA," Godden said. "Essentially this means that different groups of bears are having different sections of their DNA changed at different rates, and this activity seems linked to their specific environment and climate."

Despite the bears' potential ability to adapt to warmer climates and less ice, Godden warned that climate change remains a real threat to polar bears.

"We cannot be complacent; this offers some hope but does not mean that polar bears are at any less risk of extinction," she said. "We still need to be doing everything we can to reduce global carbon emissions and slow temperature increases."

The so-called butterfly is an asymmetrical impact crater, created when a hefty asteroid smashed into Mars in the distant past at an unusually low angle. It is located in the Idaeus Fossae region — an extremely uneven and previously volcanic region in Mars' northern lowlands — and is around 12.4 miles (20 kilometers) from east to west and 9.3 miles (15 km) from north to south. This makes the crater almost large enough to fit the island of Manhattan across its floor.

The latest images of the oval crater, which remains unnamed, were digitally created using topographical data collected by ESA's Mars Express orbiter, which has been scanning the Red Planet since 2003. The data was also used to create a short video that calls the crater a "cosmic butterfly" and shows what it would look like if you were to circle it in a helicopter (see below).

Unlike most other impact craters in the solar system, which are circular and eject material equally around their edges, the shallow angle of this incoming asteroid caused it to unevenly distribute the debris, creating the crater's wings.

"The collision caused two distinct lobes of material to be flung outwards to the crater's north and south, creating two outstretched 'wings' of raised ground," ESA representatives wrote in a statement describing the butterfly. This uneven impact also sculpted the crater's floor into an "irregular," walnut-like shape, they added.

Craters like this are commonly known as butterflies because of their rounded shape and rocky wings, and they are exceedingly rare. However, this is not the first one to be spotted on Mars.

In 2006, around three years into the Mars Express orbiter's mission, the ESA spacecraft snapped a butterfly crater in the Hesperia Planum region in Mars' southern highlands. This crater is much more elongated than the Idaeus Fossae crater and arguably has a much more bug-like appearance. (Mars' southern highlands and northern lowlands lie on either side of a geographical anomaly that "splits" the planet near the equator.)

Studying these anomalous craters helps scientists better understand the angle and force of the impacts that formed them. It can also reveal clues about the hidden layers of Mars' surface and what conditions existed when the collisions occurred, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

In the latest case, the ESA team noticed that the wings of the butterfly are much smoother than its bobbly, walnut-like floor. This suggests that this material has been "fluidized," meaning that it has been mixed with water. This most likely happened when Martian ice buried beneath the crater was melted by the impact and released into the resulting explosion, ESA representatives wrote.

It is currently unclear exactly when the newly imaged insect crater was formed or how large and fast the meteor that birthed it was. However, fragments of the space rock could potentially remain within the crater.

Animals on Mars

This is not the first time that scientists have found animal impostors lurking on Mars' surface.

NASA's various Mars rovers have found multiple rocks that bear a striking similarity to living creatures, including a turtle poking its head out from its shell, which was snapped by Perseverance in August, and a coral-like structure photographed by the Curiosity rover in 2022.

From above, certain geological features also take on a surprising likeness to wildlife, such as the infamous "spiders on Mars," which are cracks that form when ice sublimates beneath the Martian surface and look like swarming arachnids.

In September 2024, the Mars Express orbiter also helped to reveal a hidden dog-shaped blob lurking beneath Mars' North Pole.

These animal associations are often made due to pareidolia — a psychological phenomenon in which the human mind perceives a familiar pattern, such as a face or image, in random objects or structures.

With its glowing ghostly eyes, eight arms like its octopus cousins and a dark ruby coloring to match, the elusive vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis) has finally revealed its genetic secrets.

In a study published Nov. 27 in the journal iScience, researchers sequenced the genome of Vampyrotheuthis and discovered its chromosomes still resemble those of squids and cuttlefish — despite belonging to the octopus order. This discovery hints at what the common ancestor of modern squids and octopuses may have looked like at the genetic level 300 million years ago when octopus and squid evolutionarily diverged. The researchers described the vampire squid as a "living fossil."

On the cephalopod evolutionary tree, the vampire squid belongs to the group that includes octopuses, but underwent a "very ancient split" from the rest of the clade, study lead author Oleg Simakov, a researcher at the Department of Neuroscience and Developmental Biology in the University of Vienna, Austria, told Live Science in an email.

After acquiring a tissue sample from a vampire squid collected as bycatch in the West Pacific Ocean from a research cruise, the researchers used a genetic analysis platform called PacBio to sequence the DNA of the sample. Unfortunately, there were no other vampire squid samples to compare it to, due to their rarity. Using PacBio, the researchers compared the vampire squid's genome to that of other cephalopods like the Argonaut (Argonauta hians), the common octopus (Octopus vulgaris) and the curled octopus (Eledone cirrhosa).

The findings revealed the vampire squid has an 11 billion-base-pair-long genome, almost four times the size of the human genome — and the largest cephalopod genome sequenced to date.

While modern octopuses have DNA that consistently gets reshuffled, resulting in some chromosomal mixing, the researchers found that the vampire squid's genome kept much of its ancestral, squid-like chromosomal arrangement. Essentially, it's an octopod that genetically looks like an ancient squid.

The vampire squid has had a long history of being misunderstood. When it was initially discovered in 1903, it was thought to be a cirrate octopus due to its unique webbing between its arms. In the 1950s however, scientists reclassified it as its own group, belonging to neither octopus nor squid but in the order Vampyromorphida, so named because it looks like it's wearing a vampire-like cloak.

The finding is welcome news for cephalopod scientists as it is "nice to have resolved" why vampire squids retain much of their ancestral, squid-like traits, said Bruce Robison, senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) who was not involved in the research.

Part of what makes the fully sequenced genome so valuable is how hard it is to study vampire squids, mainly "because they live in a habitat that is difficult to access, they are solitary, rare, and do not survive well in captivity," Robison said. "Some people think that we can just dive into deep water, and find one whenever we like, which is definitely not the case."

He added that the findings "reinforce the notion held by some of us that vamps would be the key to the puzzle. They are interesting to study because they are such cool animals, and because they just look like they are hiding secrets."

The answer is that some types of turtles can, and others can't, experts told Live Science. And even though shells can be protective for some of these reptiles, fossil evidence suggests that shells evolved for entirely different reasons.

Tortoises are one type of turtle that can tuck their heads into their shells. This terrestrial subgroup of turtles emerged 50 million years ago, Tyler Lyson, senior curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, told Live Science. They typically move slowly, so they rely on their shells to protect them from predators. Most tortoises can draw their heads into their shells, which typically also have a domed shape with more space inside to make that possible.

Several terrestrial turtle species, which split their time between land and water, can do the same.

"Turtles have two ways of tucking the head in," Jason Head, a professor of vertebrate evolution and ecology at the University of Cambridge, told Live Science. "We have what are called the side-neck turtles. They have long necks, and they literally fold the head and neck to the side over one of their arms. And then there are the snake-neck or S-neck turtles, which put a loop into the neck, and can actually pull the neck into the shoulder girdle."

One example is the eastern box turtle (Terrapene carolina carolina), whose bottom shell, known as a plastron, is fitted with a hinge that even allows it to completely close up the shell.

But sea turtles are one group of turtles that cannot pull their heads into their shells. Sea turtles have much sleeker, lighter shells that contain no space for them to tuck their heads inside. "This is to lighten the load," Head said, and it allows sea turtles to swim faster to escape predators.

How turtle shells evolved

So, how did some turtles develop this lifesaving trick? To find out, we need to explore how turtle shells evolved, which takes us back almost 300 million years in the fossil record.

"The turtle shell is a complicated structure. It's made up of over 50 bones," Lyson said. "Bone" is the key word, because fossils reveal that turtle shells are part of their skeletons. And while the modern turtle's shell looks like a solid unit, it's actually made up of two skeletal features that evolved separately.

"The first thing we see in the evolution of the turtle shell is the broadening of the ribs, and we see that in Eunotosaurus africanus," a creature that lived in southern Africa 260 million years ago, before dinosaurs roamed Earth, Lyson told Live Science. Lyson first described Eunotosaurus' contribution to turtle evolution in a 2013 study. Researchers think that these creatures spent time burrowing underground to escape the heat and that the development of wider ribs supported more muscle mass that enabled them to do that.

Then, in Germany, the 2015 discovery of a 240 million-year-old fossil called Pappochelys showed a shell-less animal with wider upper ribs paired with thicker belly ribs — known as "gastralia" — on its underside. By 220 million years ago, an aquatic animal called Odontochelys found in China had developed a fully unified belly plate — the plastron — partly from the expanding gastralia.

"Myself and others think that the evolution of the plastron was a ballast for basically going deeper into the water column," Lyson explained. It's also possible the plastron developed to protect turtles from predators swimming below, he noted.

The first evidence of a fully formed turtle shell comes from 210 million years ago, in the shape of a fossilized creature called Proganochelys, whose thick upper ribs had fused together with dermal bone, forming a closed carapace, attached to a lower plastron. The opening for the turtle's head was formed from shoulder bones that connected the top and bottom of its shell, Lyson explained.

Most evidence suggests that these reptilian creatures, called Pantestudines, ultimately led to modern-day turtles. However, Head noted that similar features — like widened, overlapping ribs — also developed in other animals millions of years ago, including some thought to be more closely related to mammals.

"It's an active area of research, with new discoveries coming all the time," Head said.

The shells of these turtle ancestors developed as a response to varied evolutionary pressures, but today, the turtle's shell is used primarily for self-defense, Lyson noted. "The modern-day function isn't necessarily related to how that feature arose," he said. "It wasn't until you got the full advent of the shell that it was for protection."

The turtle's resilient shell has seen these creatures through almost 300 million years of history, and Lyson thinks it's one reason they've managed to survive three of Earth's five mass extinctions.

"We see the fossil record, and we can see the line in the sand where dinosaurs and lots of other things go extinct," Lyson said. "And we see turtles marching right across that line."

Evolution quiz: Can you naturally select the correct answers?

An infection from an injury that Cassius sustained in the wild more than 40 years ago burst out of a fibrous casing and "engulfed" the saltwater crocodile (Crocodylus porosus), killing him suddenly, Sally Isberg, the managing director of the Center for Crocodile Research in Darwin who conducted the examination, told ABC News.

Sealed, "dormant" infections are well documented in crocodiles, but Cassius had the longest reported existence of such an infection, Isberg said. "In mammals, it's known as an abscess," she said. "In reptiles, it's known as a fibrosis."

Cassius had a fibrosis lodged near his left lung that exploded last November, just a few months after Isberg conducted a health checkup and concluded that the crocodile was "happy and healthy." Just 17 days before Cassius's death, Isberg visited him and found no signs of disease. There had been no warning of an infection until the fibrosis ruptured, because the casing kept the infection neatly packaged and sealed, Isberg said.

The infection probably stemmed from when Cassius lost his front left leg as a youngster, before he was captured in the Northern Territory and brought into captivity in 1984.

"What we didn't know was that the rib cage had also been damaged in that injury," Isberg said. "Upon necropsy, his left rib was distended compared to his right one," because it housed the fibrosis.

The fibrosis finally burst because Cassius was growing too old, Isberg explained. "It's because the cells are breaking down, they're not able to renew themselves," she said. "He [Cassius] was not able to continue [making] that fibrous casing around that infection."

After Cassius died, Isberg removed one of his thigh bones to estimate his age more precisely. Staff at Marineland Crocodile Park, where Cassius lived for 40 years until his death, celebrated Cassius's 120th birthday in 2023 — but that age was a maximum estimate, given that the crocodile was between 30 and 80 years old when he was captured.

Isberg hoped that the thigh bone would show growth rings, but the tests didn't give a definitive result, because temperatures at Marineland Crocodile Park are very stable, she said. Growth rings on crocodile bones vary with metabolism fluctuations, which are partly dependent on temperature.

Cassius has now been taxidermied and returned to the crocodile park for an exhibit that will open Saturday (Dec. 12).

Crocodile quiz: Test your knowledge on the prehistoric predators

Scientists have filmed a never-before-seen species of deep-sea squid burying itself upside down in the seafloor — a behavior never documented in cephalopods. They captured the bizarre scene while studying the depths of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), an abyssal plain in the Pacific Ocean targeted for deep-sea mining.

The team described the encounter in a study published Nov. 25 in the journal Ecology, writing that the animal appears to be an undescribed species of whiplash squid. At a depth of roughly 13,450 feet (4,100 meters), the squid had buried almost its entire body in sediment and was hanging upside down, with its siphon and two long tentacles held rigid above the seafloor.

"The fact that this is a squid and it's covering itself in mud — it's novel for squid and the fact that it is upside down," lead author Alejandra Mejía-Saenz, a deep-sea ecologist at the Scottish Association for Marine Science, told Live Science. "We had never seen anything like that in any cephalopods. … It was very novel and very puzzling."

Mud covering and burial have been seen in octopuses and cuttlefish, and even in shallower-water squid species before. However, these behaviors had never been documented in a deep-sea squid before — and never upside down.

"It was so exciting and unexpected to observe burying behaviour in a deep-sea squid, something that has never been seen before!" study co-author Bethany Fleming, a researcher at the University of Southampton and the National Oceanography Centre in the U.K., said in a statement emailed to Live Science.

Masquerade on the seafloor

The encounter happened during the SMARTEX project, a U.K.-led expedition to study how deep-sea mining might affect life in the CCZ. The team's remotely operated vehicle (ROV) was filming across a commercial exploration area, when the squid appeared underneath it, with its tentacles looking like the stalks of glass sponges or large tube worms that dot the seemingly barren abyssal plain.

At first the squid underneath the ROV, seemingly unaware of its existence. It was then that the researchers realized it was a type of squid due to its movements and body traits. However, the squid then seemed to disappear from camera.

“[Fleming] first saw this and said ‘wait a minute, is the squid actually there?’ Because the only thing we could see were two white things sticking out.” Mejía-Saenz said.

The case of the disappearing squid was quickly solved when the researchers realized it had buried itself. From watching the squid, the team believes it is camouflaging itself, proposing potentially two reasons why it had buried itself with its tentacles poking out: it was trying avoid predators like beaked whales or it had seen crustaceans, its favorite prey, crawling around the glass sponges in the area and was mimicking the sponges with its tentacles to attract a snack. "We thought, 'okay then if the sponge is attracting the crustacean and the squid is imitating the sponge and it eats the crustacean, that would make sense'," Mejía-Saenz said.

If that's right, the squid may be using a strategy biologists call masquerade — looking like an inedible object so predators ignore it — combined with a booby-trap for prey. In the food-poor abyss, that kind of ambush could be a smart energy trade-off, as animals waste less energy waiting for food to come to them than they would chasing it, all while remaining invisible to nearby threats.

Jim Barry, a senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in California who was not involved in the study, agreed that the squid appears to be mimicking the glass sponges seen in the CCZ. "When the squid assumes the charade behavior it is similar to some seafloor invertebrates (sponges, soft corals, polychaete worms) that inhabit the region," he told Live Science in an email.

Why abyssal squid are so rarely seen

Deep plains like the CCZ cover vast areas of seafloor, yet they remain among the least-explored habitats on the planet. "The ocean is huge," Mejía-Saenz said, and abyssal plains "are one of the least explored parts of the ocean."

Even in this comparatively well-studied zone, the team's broader survey found just 33 cephalopod encounters across roughly 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) of ROV tracks. That tiny tally helps explain why behaviors like mud-covering masquerade are only now coming to light.

"Considering the very limited observations that have been made at abyssal depths, it may not be surprising to discover a new species," Barry said. "Abyssal squids are very rare and those with a mimicking behavior are even less known to science. …the main reason we know so little about deep sea cephalopods is [the] very limited amount of effort that has gone into exploring the deep-sea."

Mining into the unknown

What makes this single squid especially worrying is where it was seen. The CCZ is the primary target for the proposed deep-sea mining of nickel, cobalt, manganese and other metals used in batteries.

"The reason why we know so much about the CCZ is because there are commercial interests on it," Mejía-Saenz said. To retrieve the valuable minerals, mining vehicles would stir up sediment plumes that blanket nearby life. "Disturbance to the seafloor would have negative consequences mostly likely for these animals," she said. "The extent of those consequences, we still don't know."

Barry said we increasingly depend on deep-sea resources. In potential mining zones, "there is much at stake," he said, "and it is imperative that we understand at a minimum what life inhabits these sites and how vulnerable these biological communities are to human activities."

Bruce Robison, an MBARI scientist who was not involved in the study, said discoveries like this mud-covered squid highlight the limits of our knowledge.

"Deep-sea squid are fast, agile, and wary, so they only let us see them when they want to, or when they just don't care," he told Live Science in an email. "We must have observed only a very small fraction of their behaviors. It's always surprising to learn about a new (to us) tactic that squids have in their bag of tricks."

The northern resident population of orcas (Orcinus orca), or killer whales, off British Columbia has been observed teaming up with Pacific white-sided dolphins (Aethalodelphis obliquidens) in hunts for Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha).

The researchers used underwater video, data from suction-cup biologging tags and aerial drone footage to establish how nine northern resident orcas moved and hunted in August 2020 — and how they interacted with Pacific white-sided dolphins around Vancouver Island, Canada.

They captured aerial and underwater footage of the animals' coordinated interactions. The two species in this area generally show few signs of mutual aggression and sometimes seek each other out, which is unusual given that orcas hunt dolphins in other locations, while some dolphins mob orcas.

The researchers recorded 258 instances of dolphins traveling near tagged orcas. In all these cases, the orcas were engaged in foraging-related behaviors, such as killing, eating or hunting for salmon, which are too large for dolphins to capture and swallow whole.

The researchers observed 25 instances of orcas changing course after encountering dolphins, after which both would dive down, potentially foraging. This may be a result of orcas listening out for dolphin echolocations, said study lead author Sarah Fortune, an oceanographer at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada.

The authors also recorded eight instances of orcas catching salmon, breaking them up and sharing the pieces with other orcas. Dolphins were present on four of these occasions, and on one of them, the dolphins scavenged the conveniently broken-up salmon remains.

"The surprising thing for us is that knowing the resident killer whales are specialists in hunting Chinook salmon, the killer whales should really be the best ones at finding them, so why are they bothering to follow the dolphins?" Fortune told Live Science.

She said the findings are the first documented recording of cooperative hunting and prey-sharing between orcas and dolphins. The research was published in the journal Scientific Reports on Thursday (Dec. 11).

Researchers still aren't sure whether it is a cooperative system that both species benefit from equally, Fortune added. "We haven't been able to quantify the extent to which killer whales and dolphins obtain benefits from this interaction, but from our observations we see positive outcomes for both."

By associating with the orcas, the dolphins may also get protection from other populations of orcas that do hunt dolphins, she said.

"It's perhaps unsurprising, given the learning abilities of toothed whales, that these two species have learned that certain aspects of foraging in the same time and place bring advantages to both species," said Luke Rendell, a reader in biology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland who wasn't involved in the study. "I find the risk management the dolphins have to do around killer whales is particularly impressive," he told Live Science by email, adding that if you hang out with the wrong orcas "you get eaten."

Scrounging for food?

Michael Weiss at the Center for Whale Research in Friday Harbor, Washington who wasn't involved in the research, noted he wasn't sure whether the observed behavior showed the two species working together.

"I'm not completely convinced that what we're seeing here is cooperative; it seems clear that the dolphins can benefit from reduced predation risk and scrounging from killer whale kills, but I think more work needs to be done to demonstrate a benefit to the whales," Weiss told Live Science by email.

Instead, the behavior might be kleptoparasitism ― one animal stealing food that another has already hunted — noted Jared Towers, the executive director of Bay Cetology, a cetacean research institute in Canada, who wasn't involved in the research.

"They provide evidence for the dolphins stealing fish scraps from the killer whale meals and that's really nice to see, because that's exactly what we thought has been happening all these years," Towers told Live Science.

He said the coordinated movements also support another hypothesis — the idea of orcas avoiding dolphins, not cooperating with them. "The killer whales take longer dives, they travel further underwater and they reduce vocal activity. To me, this suggests that the killer whales are trying to avoid the dolphins."

Fortune agrees other hypotheses are possible. "The dolphins might be the ones sneaking in and stealing the fish from the killer whales, like a kleptoparasite, but we have observations of dolphins going after salmon at the surface and on at least one occasion you see the dolphin catch a salmon, then it loses it, then tries to catch it again," she said. "It's clear that the dolphins want the salmon but they're not necessarily well adapted morphologically to capture those big fish."

Working with orcas would give the dolphins the means to actually get the fish, she added, while the orcas may be able to locate salmon more easily by following dolphins.

Fortune said further investigation of the relationship between these marine mammals is needed to understand how widespread and consistent any cooperative behaviors may be.

In recent years, orcas have been spotted getting up to all kinds of shenanigans, showing impressive levels of cultural learning. Members of the southern resident population near Washington and British Columbia have been seen wearing salmon on their heads and giving each other massages with kelp. And another group of the smart marine mammals has been damaging boats off the coast of Spain.

Orca quiz: Will you sink or swim?

The tracksite sits along what was once an ancient coastline, with ripple marks extending alongside the footprints and other imprints in a northwest-southeast direction, according to a new study. Most of the tracks belong to bipedal, three-toed dinosaurs known as theropods that lived at the end of the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago), but many bird tracks are also preserved, the scientists noted in the paper, which was published Wednesday (Dec. 3) in the journal PLOS One.

"This is the highest number of dinosaur footprints ever found for a single tracksite thus far," study co-author Jeremy McLarty, a paleontologist and associate professor at the Southwestern Adventist University in Texas, told Live Science in an email. "In addition to preserving the most dinosaur tracks worldwide, it also preserves the highest number of swim trackways in the world."

In total, McLarty and his colleagues counted 16,600 theropod footprints and 1,378 swim tracks. These were found in Bolivia's Carreras Pampa tracksite, which was already known but hadn't been properly studied or documented.

Carreras Pampa extends across 80,570 square feet (7,485 square meters) in Torotoro National Park. The initial work involved sweeping debris off the dinosaur imprints with brooms, clearing the tracksite of rocks and removing sediment in places where additional tracks were likely to be found.

The team discovered a huge variety of footprint shapes and sizes, indicating that many types of theropod dinosaurs roamed along the ancient coastline. Several tracks had footprints shorter than 4 inches (10 centimeters), which is rare in the fossil record, according to the study. It's unclear if these footprints were made by small theropod species such as Coelophysis or by juveniles of larger species, the researchers wrote.

The largest footprints were more than 12 inches (30 cm) long, and the team thinks these may have been made by mid-size theropod dinosaurs such as Dilophosaurus or Allosaurus. Large theropods such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Giganotosaurus typically leave 16-inch-long (40 cm) footprints, the researchers noted.

Carreras Pampa is unique because the footprints show different dinosaur behaviors, such as walking, running, swimming, tail-dragging and making sharp turns. "It preserves evidence of several types of unusually preserved locomotive behaviors, and preserves one of the highest numbers of dinosaur tail traces anywhere in the world," McLarty said.

The swim tracks are straight or comma-shaped grooves that often have one or two similar but smaller grooves next to them, McLarty said. The main groove is from theropods scratching the sediment at the bottom of the water with their middle toe, while the smaller grooves are from the other toes. Unlike other sites that preserve only individual dinosaur swim tracks, Carreras Pampa preserves alternating left and right tracks, he said.

The abundance of imprints shows that Carreras Pampa was a prehistoric highway, and the parallel orientation of some trackways suggests some dinosaurs traveled in groups.

Bolivia is known for being a dino track hotspot.

"The tracksite with the next highest number of tracks is also in Bolivia," McLarty said. "The Cal Orck'o tracksite is located in an active quarry as a nearly vertical wall and is long and thin. The Carreras Pampa tracksite is spread out across a wider area."

The enormous snakes' average body size has remained constant since they first appeared in the fossil record about 12.4 million years ago, during the Middle Miocene (16 million to 11.6 million years ago), researchers revealed in a new study published Monday (Dec. 1) in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

During the Middle and Upper Miocene (12.4 million to 5.3 million years ago), warm temperatures, expansive wetlands and abundant food enabled many animal species to grow much larger than their modern relatives. But few of these giant animals have survived to the present day.

"Other species like giant crocodiles and giant turtles have gone extinct since the Miocene, probably due to cooling global temperatures and shrinking habitats," study co-author Andrés Alfonso-Rojas, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Cambridge, said in a statement. "But the giant anacondas have survived — they are super-resilient."

Anacondas make up a group of constricting snakes that today includes the heaviest snake species in the world. Modern anacondas average 13 to 16 feet (4 to 5 meters) in length, though the largest can reach up to 23 feet (7 m). Scientists weren't sure whether anacondas had been even larger during the Miocene, or whether they had been the same size and retained their massive size into the present day.

To estimate how big ancient anacondas might have been, Alfonso-Rojas and his colleagues measured 183 fossilized anaconda vertebrae from at least 32 individual snakes collected in Venezuela. They also used a technique called ancestral state reconstruction to predict the body lengths of ancient anacondas from characteristics of related snakes.

Based on these calculations, the team found that anacondas averaged about 17 feet (5.2 m) long when they first appeared during the Miocene 12 million years ago — roughly the same length as modern anacondas.

"This is a surprising result because we expected to find the ancient anacondas were seven or eight meters [23 to 26 feet] long," Alfonso-Rojas said in the statement. "But we don't have any evidence of a larger snake from the Miocene when global temperatures were warmer."

It's still unclear why anacondas have not become smaller over time.

Although warm weather and abundant wetlands may have enabled anacondas to reach their giant size early in their evolutionary history, cooler temperatures and shrinking ranges haven't forced the snakes to get smaller to adapt. That could suggest that these weren't the primary factors keeping the snakes large in the intervening millennia, the researchers wrote in the study.

Predator-prey interactions likely didn't play a major role in maintaining the snakes' body size, either, the researchers said. A lack of competition for food could have helped the snakes grow large in the first place. But they didn't get smaller as other predators moved into South America during the Pliocene (5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago) and the Pleistocene (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago), suggesting that food availability isn't a big factor in anacondas' giant size.

Snake quiz: How much do you know about the slithering reptiles?

But what's the difference between a salamander and a newt? And how do you tell them apart?

"It's one of those things where all newts are salamanders, but all salamanders aren't newts," Nick Burgmeier, a research biologist at Purdue University, told Live Science.

Within the tree of life, salamanders are a large and diverse group of tailed amphibians. "They are the order Caudata, which literally means 'tailed' in Latin," said Karen Kiemnec-Tyburczy, an associate professor at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt who specializes in salamanders. There are a total of 10 families of salamanders, she said. Newts are a subfamily called Pleurodelinae, within the Salamandridae family.

Since all newts are salamanders, there isn't really a distinct characteristic that separates one from the other. However, some species in the newt subfamily possess a few interesting traits, Burgmeier said. For example, a number of newts have warty, bumpy-looking skin. "They tend to have rougher skin," Burgmeier said, as opposed to salamanders' smooth, slimy skin.

This is likely because newts are the most toxic salamanders; their skin contains many poison glands. For instance, the skin of a rough-skinned newt (Taricha granulosa), a species found in western North America, has bacteria that secrete tetrodotoxin. It's the same toxin found in Japanese pufferfish and can be fatal if ingested.

"It would be pretty catastrophic if you happen to throw one in your mouth," Burgmeier said.

Further, salamanders in general have a "biphasic" lifestyle, Burgmeier noted, which means they often start the beginning of their life in water and then move on to land. With some newts, this life cycle can be "triphasic," which means they start their life in the water, have a juvenile "eft" phase in which they go onto land, and then end adulthood back in the water.

An example of this is the eastern newt (Notophthalmus viridescens), a common species in the eastern U.S. The newt has a characteristic bright orange juvenile that roams the forest floors (called a red eft). The efts live on land for around two to three years, equipped with developed lungs and toxins to ward off predators, before eventually metamorphosing into an aquatic adult.

However, interestingly, some coastal populations of eastern newts will skip their eft stage completely, spending their entire life underwater. And variations in lifecycles are common among newts and salamanders. Many newts in Europe and Asia have a more traditional biphasic lifestyle rather than the triphasic, Burgmeier said.

Similarly, not all newts have bumpy, toxic skin. Many, like the smooth newt (Lissotriton vulgaris), have smooth skin.

One reason for the lack of unifying newt traits is likely that when herpetology began, naming wasn't standardized.

"The term 'newt,' historically, was used informally as a common name for these sort of warty, bumpy [salamanders]," Kiemnec-Tyburczy told Live Science. "But it turns out that they are not each other's closest relatives. As salamander taxonomy became clearer throughout the 20th century, scientists classified the warty, bumpy salamanders and their closest relatives as newts. As a result today's subfamily hosts a hodgepodge of characteristics.

Diversity also abounds in the salamander order. There are lungless salamanders that have no larval stage at all; they develop inside the egg. Some salamanders, axolotls, never develop past their tadpole stage. Around the world, salamander species can also range from an inch (2.5 centimeters) to up to 6 feet (1.8 meters) long.

Salamanders are “just super cool," Burgmeier said. He studies the eastern hellbender (Cryptobranchus alleganiensis alleganiensis), the largest salamander in North America. Their presence and health can tell scientists a lot about water quality. For the smaller newts and salamanders, they can be a key part of the food web, eating invertebrates and supporting aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems alike, Burgmeier added.

"Salamanders have a ton of different things going on," Kiemnec-Tyburczy said. "Newts are just a small subset of all of the diversity within salamanders."

Animal quiz: Test yourself on these fun animal trivia questions

The findings reveal that people in the region had an enduring and complex relationship with such animals for thousands of years before domestic cats arrived with merchants along the Silk Road 1,400 years ago.

"Now, they [leopard cats] are our hidden neighbors, but thousands of years ago they lived in a closer relationship with people," study co-author Shu-Jin Luo, principal investigator at Peking University's School of Life Sciences in Beijing, China, told Live Science.

The work was published Thursday (Nov. 27) in the journal Cell Genomics.

Modern domestic cats (Felis catus), which are descended from African wildcats (Felis lybica), have adapted so successfully to living with humans that they are now found on every continent except for Antarctica.

Yet when and where they were originally domesticated is uncertain, with researchers previously suggesting the Levant 9,500 years ago and Egypt about 3,500 years ago. One of the main hypotheses is that they spread to Europe with Neolithic farmers about 2,500 years ago and then were eventually taken along the Silk Road through Eurasia into China.

However, in 2013, evidence of cats living alongside humans in western China thousands of years before that, in about 3300 B.C., came to light, casting doubt on that idea.

In 2022, analysis of the cat DNA revealed that these ancient cats in China weren't domestic cats but were leopard cats (Prionailurus bengalensis), a small wild cat native to South, Southeast and East Asia.

Rather than clearing everything up, the result led to more questions: how long the leopard cats had lived alongside humans, when and how domestic cats reached China, and what drama played out when the domestic cats turned up and found that they weren't the only felid in town.

To find out more, researchers behind the new study used radiocarbon dating and DNA sequencing of nuclear and mitochondrial genomes from samples of 22 ancient felid bones, which were unearthed in 14 archaeological sites across China dating from about 3500 B.C. to A.D. 1800. The scientists then compared their results with previously published ancient and modern cat genomes from around the world.

Of the 22 individuals, 14, dated to between about A.D. 730 and 1800, were domestic cats. The earliest domestic cat was excavated from Tongwan City, a key hub along the Silk Road in western China. Previous research identified another domestic cat farther west along the Silk Road in Kazakhstan, dated to between A.D. 775 and 940.

The earliest known depictions of domestic cats in China are painted motifs in two tombs in central China dating to about A.D. 820 and 830, and there is also a written account from about the same time of the empress presenting a pet cat to her ministers.

These records hint that domestic cats arrived in China via the Silk Road relatively recently, in about A.D. 700, and as a recent introduction were thought of as exotic pets and likely kept among the ancient Chinese elite, Luo told Live Science. The cats were often white, which was considered a sacred color in animals, she said.

All the earlier remains belonged to leopard cats, dating from between about 5,400 years ago to approximately A.D. 150.

When the researchers studied the cats, they realized that the close relationship between humans and leopard cats was not a transient and occasional thing but instead a shared history lasting for over 3,500 years, Luo said.

She added that leopard cats in ancient China may have once occupied a similar niche to domestic cats, entering a commensal relationship with humans by preying on small rodents in villages and fields.

"I think in ancient times, people would keep the cub and try to raise it so they can catch rodents. I don't think it's ever been fully domesticated, but it was definitely a more intimate relationship than with today's leopard cat," Luo said.

Eva-Maria Geigl, a paleogeneticist at the Jacques Monod Institute of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) who wasn't involved in the study, told Live Science the findings reflect the domestication process of cats around the Mediterranean. "It's a commensal relationship, taking advantage of the human niche and this was very welcomed by the Neolithic farmers as they really had to struggle with the rodents and with venomous animals," she told Live Science. "Such cats were not domesticated in the sense as we see it now — these couch potatoes — they were real wild cats still."

Records compiled between the fifth and third centuries B.C in China provide further evidence of this relationship, Luo said, indicating that people welcomed wild cats on their farms for pest control. This means leopard cats may have had a relationship with humans that lasted approximately 3,500 years, she said.

However, this relationship eventually ended, and there is a nearly 600-year gap between the last uncovered leopard cats and the earliest appearance of domestic cats in China.

Luo said this lack of cats coincides with the Period of Division (A.D. 220 to 589) after the collapse of the Han dynasty and before the rise of the Tang dynasty. It was a time of war and colder, drier conditions with declining agricultural yields, social unrest and a shrinking population. A similar temporary population decline was seen in black rats (Rattus rattus) in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire.

This means the leopard cats likely lost their hunting grounds, Luo said. When the Tang dynasty was established in A.D. 618, and agriculture and the human population rebounded, the leopard cats were no longer so welcome, because of the rise of keeping chickens.

Leopard cats still have a bad reputation for killing chickens, she said, so the cats would have become unwelcome animals. In southern parts of China, the leopard cat has the nickname the "chicken-killing tiger," Luo said.

Domestic cats took their place because they are cute, tame and generally catch smaller prey like mice and rats, not chickens, Luo suggested.

Geigl said the crucial shift that led domestic cats to gain widespread acceptance probably came in Egypt in the first millennium B.C., when people bred cats in temples and fed many cats together, and a genetic mutation led to behavioral change. "This is not normal behavior for a cat. A cat is a territorial solitary animal, just the opposite of what the Egyptians had," she noted.

Cat quiz: Can you get a purr-fect score?

Researchers uncovered the footprints above the skeletons of extinct rhinoceroses called Teleoceras in the Ashfall Fossil Beds of northeastern Nebraska. The dog tracks mark the first direct evidence of large carnivores in the beds, which are nicknamed "Rhino Pompeii" because they have preserved so many Teleoceras rhinos that perished in widespread fallout from volcanic activity at Yellowstone.

"The eruption was so massive that ash would have fallen like snow 1,000 miles [1,600 kilometers] from the eruption site in Idaho," Ashley Poust, a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Nebraska State Museum, told Live Science. "This would have darkened the skies, buried plant life and water sources, and been a real hazard to anything with a delicate respiratory system."

Ancient horses, giraffe-like camels, numerous rhinos and various other animals were entombed in glass-like ash at the Nebraska site. However, until the footprint discovery, researchers hadn't found hard evidence of large meat eaters in the beds, which is unusual, given the abundance of preserved prey.

The footprints were up to 3.2 inches (8 centimeters) long and 3 inches (7.5 cm) wide, matching those of the large, extinct canids Aelurodon taxoides and Epicyon saevus, which crushed and ate bones like modern hyenas do. Not only do the footprints confirm the presence of large carnivores in the beds, but their positioning above the rhino layers suggests that the dogs survived the cataclysmic event that wiped out many animals.

"Survival of top predators after ecological collapse is a little unexpected and has a lot to teach us about how life responds and recovers after disasters," Poust said. Big predators sit at the top of the food chain, so they normally starve if it collapses.

Poust presented preliminary findings from his research Nov. 12 at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology 2025 annual meeting in Birmingham, England. The findings haven't been peer-reviewed yet, as Poust and his colleagues still have to complete their research and submit it to a journal.

The clearest trackways were uncovered in 2014 and 2023, according to the researchers. While the footprints have yet to be formally described in a journal, their existence isn't a secret. Poust said people visiting the Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park can see the footprints, and his team has subjected the tracks to laser scanning within the public's view. Epicyon is also listed on the University of Nebraska State Museum's ashfall animals webpage.

Northeastern Nebraska once had a similar environment to the African plains. Poust noted that the Ashfall Fossil Beds preserved a seasonal lake that hosted aquatic life, like turtles, and attracted all manner of animals.

"Imagine a watering hole similar to those on the savanna today, but with slightly unfamiliar animals," Poust said. "The sandy shoreline would have been shared by flocks of birds and herds of short-legged rhinos, camels, and five species of horses, some with three toes on each foot."

The dog tracks are present in multiple ash layers and point in different directions, which Poust and his colleagues say is an indication that the predators were making extended or repeated visits to the area after it was caked in volcanic fallout.

It's not yet clear how the dogs were surviving at the time, but one possibility is that they fed on buried rhinos and other carcasses in the immediate aftermath of the eruption.

"There is some evidence that they may have scavenged among the animals who didn't survive, using the buried rhinos as a food cache," Poust said. "But since we haven't found the bones of these meat eaters, we aren't sure yet whether this was enough to see them through to better times, or whether they eventually had to depart to seek their fortunes elsewhere in the massive disaster zone that covered much of North America."

The wolf DNA isn't left over from when dogs and wolves diverged; instead, it most likely came from interbreeding in the past few thousand years. That wolfish influence may be linked to certain characteristics, such as size and personality traits, in different dog breeds, researchers reported Nov. 24 in the journal PNAS.

"Dogs are our buddies, but apparently wolves have been a big part of shaping them into the companions we know and love today," study co-author Logan Kistler, curator of archaeobotany and archaeogenomics at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., said in a statement.

Wolves and dogs genetically split more than 20,000 years ago. Since then, there has been some gene flow between dogs and wolves, thanks to their genetic compatibility. To measure the extent of intermixing and its effects on both animals, researchers studied the previously published genomes of nearly 2,700 dogs and wolves from the Late Pleistocene (the last ice age) to the present. This group included 146 ancient dogs and wolves, 1,872 modern dogs and about 300 "village dogs" that lived around humans but weren't pets.

At least 264 modern dog breeds have wolf ancestry passed on from mating that occurred an average of 900 dog generations ago, which equates to about 2,600 years ago — long after dogs became domesticated at least 20,000 years ago, the team found. The most wolfish dogs had up to 40% wolf ancestry in their genomes, but most had between zero and 5% wolf ancestry.

"Prior to this study, the leading science seemed to suggest that in order for a dog to be a dog, there can't be very much wolf DNA present, if any," study co-author Audrey Lin, an evolutionary biologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, said in the statement. "But we found if you look very closely in modern dog genomes, wolf is there. This suggests that dog genomes can "tolerate" wolf DNA up to an unknown level and still remain the dogs we know and love."

Czechoslovakian and Saarloos wolfdogs had the highest degree of wolf ancestry, which is perhaps unsurprising, since they were intentionally bred by crossing domestic dogs with wolves in the 20th century. Larger dogs and certain working breeds — such as Arctic sled dogs, hunting dogs and certain guardian dog breeds from west and Central Asia, such as Anatolian shepherds — tended to have higher levels of wolf ancestry.

But plenty of breeds didn't fit these patterns. Some large guardian dogs, such as bullmastiffs and Saint Bernards, didn't have any detectable wolf ancestry. And some smaller dogs had small amounts of wolfish DNA. For instance, 0.2% of the Chihuahua's genome can be traced back to wolves, the team found.

"This completely makes sense to anyone who owns a Chihuahua," Lin said in the statement. "And what we've found is that this is the norm — most dogs are a little bit wolfy."

Meanwhile, every tested "village dog" had wolf DNA in its genome, the scientists found. And the reason why might be related to their survival. "The stretches of wolf DNA we found in village dog genomes contained genes related to olfactory receptors," Lin and Kistler wrote in The Conversation. "We imagine that olfactory abilities influenced by wolf genes may have helped these free-living dogs survive in harsh, volatile environments."

Some personality traits that kennel clubs use to describe certain breeds also tracked with the amount of wolfish influence. Breeds with lower wolf ancestry were frequently described as "friendly," "easy to train" or "lively," while breeds with more wolf DNA were pegged as "suspicious of strangers," "independent" and "dignified." It's not yet clear if wolf genes are directly responsible for these traits.

The wolf swam into deep water to retrieve a floating buoy attached to a submerged crab trap. It couldn't see the crab trap, but seemed to know the trap was there and how the human tool worked — once back on shore, the wolf began to reel in the line that led to the trap, scientists explained in a new research paper. Finally, when the trap emerged from the water, the wolf broke it open and devoured the bait inside.

Wolves (Canis lupus) have been recorded interacting with human objects before, but this behavior was much more sophisticated than anything previously documented in these animals, according to the study, which was published Nov. 17 in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

"This is a new dimension of wolf behaviour we had not seen before," study lead author Kyle Artelle, an assistant professor at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, told Live Science in an email. "It shows how we have likely only scratched the surface of what the other species we share this world with can do, what and how they think, and what they can teach us."

The bait-snatching wolf lives within the Indigenous Haíɫzaqv Nation Territory on the central coast of British Columbia. These wolves spend a lot of time on the coast, with many relying on the sea for their food, according to the Haíɫzaqv Wolf and Biodiversity Project, which was responsible for the new research and which Artelle helps coordinate.

The new behavior was spotted because Haíɫzaqv Guardians, Indigenous people who conduct research and monitoring on behalf of their nation and the project, kept finding their crab traps damaged by an unknown predator. The crab traps are part of an attempt to eradicate invasive European green crabs (Carcinus maenas), which outcompete native crabs and generally disrupt Canada's marine ecosystems, so it's important for the traps to remain intact.

Initially, it was suspected that seals, sea lions or otters may have been responsible for the damage. A lot of the traps are placed in deep water and don't get exposed even at low tide, so it seemed likely that the culprit was a marine animal. However, within a day of the researchers deploying camera traps in May 2024 in attempts to identify the culprit, the wolf was caught red-pawed.

Wolves have long had a reputation for being smart, but this footage could be the best example yet of their cognitive prowess, the researchers said.

"We realized this was important on the first watching," Artelle said. "Folks who know wolves well have always recognized how intelligent they are, but here is a video that really speaks for itself, that really highlights this clever behaviour, and shows us another aspect of the kinds of behaviours they can exhibit that we had not seen before."

The wolf's seemingly advanced intellect might not come as a surprise to owners of their domesticated pet cousins. Sophisticated behavior is well documented in dogs (Canis lupus familiaris), helped by the fact that we spend so much time with them. Researchers have even compared some dog behaviors, like learning the meaning of human words and gestures, to those of our famously quick-witted relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), according to the study.

Researchers have also considered that dogs may be tool users, evidenced by behaviors such as moving chairs to [then jump on to in order to] access food. The same is potentially true for dingos, which have similarly been observed manipulating furniture in captivity. However, the authors couldn't find any reported tool use by a canid (member of the dog and wolf family) in the wild, which could make the wolf's clever feat the first case of wolf tool use captured on camera.

Tool use was once considered a unique trait of human intelligence. However, scientists have steadily dismantled this idea by documenting various nonhuman animals — including chimpanzees, capuchin monkeys and New Caledonian crows (Corvus moneduloides) — using tools. Of course, plenty of animals don't need to use tools, so the behavior is not necessarily the most reliable indicator of superior intelligence.

Precisely what constitutes tool use is debated among scientists, which muddies the new findings. Researchers generally accept that tool use involves the manipulation of an external object to achieve a specific goal with intent. However, some behaviors, like the pulling of a rope, can be excluded from definitions when the animals aren't deemed responsible for the rope's orientation, according to the study.

The wolf's use of a line to retrieve crab traps might be complex enough to be an exception to some researchers' rope exclusion rule. The problem is that the authors of the new study aren't sure what mechanisms are driving this newly observed behavior.

While the wolf appeared to have a sophisticated understanding of the unseen trap and its connection to the floating buoy above — potentially stemming from watching the Haíɫzaqv Guardians interact with the traps — the study doesn't rule out that the animals used a much simpler cognitive process: trial and error.

The camera traps, which are now a permanent feature in the Haíɫzaqv crab-hunting areas, have yet to capture a second incident of a wolf hauling up submerged bait. However, the researchers did retrieve some earlier clips that suggest one camera got tantalizingly close. The camera's footage opens with a dark wolf walking toward an exposed crab line that disappears off-screen. Once the wolf is out of shot, the line wobbles, and the next time the camera is triggered, the wolf is seen investigating the bait cups of two traps that have somehow made it to shore.

A stunning new animation shows saber-toothed cats attacking a herd of woolly mammoths toward the end of the last ice age in the frozen north of North America.

Airing Wednesday (Nov. 26) in an episode of Apple TV's upcoming series "Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age," the clip explores how iconic ice age animals adapted to changes in their environment as the climate began to warm and their snowy world gradually disappeared. In the video, a pack of five scimitar-toothed cats (Homotherium serum) — a now extinct species of saber-tooth cat — ambush a herd of woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) that includes a tiny calf and a large adult male.

"That whole story is set in the frozen north, sort of Alaska-Yukon," Mike Gunton, executive producer of the upcoming series and creative director of BBC Studios' Natural History Unit in the U.K., told Live Science in an email. "Those creatures both were sort of stars of the Ice Age, hyper-adapted to life in the cold. The story really is about what happens when those two types of animals are finding their world changing."

As the last ice age drew to a close about 11,500 years ago, ice sheets retreated across North America. This drove some species into extinction, as did hunting from humans living in the Americas at the time, reducing the animal populations that scimitar-toothed cats preyed on. "The prey that they would normally feed on are not around as much as they were," Gunton said. "The fortune of that day is that the cats find a herd of mammoths coming into their pack, and they take the opportunity to try and hunt them."

Woolly mammoths also struggled to survive at the end of the last ice age, and the clip shows the herd taking an unusual route across a plain to find new feeding grounds, Gunton said. Exposed — as they are in the clip — the mammoths come under attack. After a nail-biting few seconds where a scimitar-toothed cat leaps onto the male mammoth and hangs off his trunk by the claws, the mammoth overpowers the five cats and scares them off.

Meanwhile, the females and the calf retreat, huddle together and watch the scene unfold. While researchers think that woolly mammoth herds were female-led and males dispersed at a young age, sexually-mature males occasionally joined herds to mate, Gunton said.

"These males have what they call [musth] — they have these glands on the temporal area of their skulls, and they weep, producing particular pheromones — and that gets everybody excited," he said. "This mammoth was with them [in the clip] because you get males coming to join a herd with the idea of mating with the females, and they will spend a lot of time wandering around with them."

The mammoths survive this encounter, but the scimitar-toothed cats eventually triumph in a sequence later in the show, Gunton said.

"At the end of the program, we see them trying again with [a] different strategy," he said, adding that one of the cats lunges off a high rocky outcrop onto the back of the male mammoth, giving the other cats the opportunity to pile on and take the mammoth down. "And then they feed," Gunton said.

The hunting technique of scimitar-toothed cats in the second clip is similar to that of leopards, which also leap onto their prey from above, Gunton said. Recreating these attacks was a big challenge for the filmmakers, because "you've got two animals created in visual effects actually interacting with each other," he said.

A bigger challenge still was making the animals appear realistic, given that they are covered in fur and moving in a snowy landscape.

"Every one of those creatures will have millions of individual little hairs on it, all of which behave on their own independently," Gunton said. "Then they're doing stuff in snow, so you've got complex interactions between snow itself. It's sort of the pinnacle of what is tough to do in this series."

Read more | How to watch 'Prehistoric Planet' – Streaming details as new season 'Ice Age' lands on Apple TV

Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have long been known for violent conflict or "warfare." It was first documented by English primate researcher Jane Goodall, who in 1974 observed the chimpanzee community in Gombe National Park in Tanzania splinter into two warring groups, leading to a four-year battle that resulted in the deaths of all the males in one group. But why the animals persisted with the violence for so long wasn't clear.

To shed light on this, the lead author of a new study Brian Wood, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues examined data collected on chimpanzees in Kibale National Park in southwestern Uganda over more than three decades.

Between 1998 and 2008, the Ngogo chimpanzees of Kibale engaged in violent clashes with their neighbors. During this decade of conflict, at least 21 chimpanzees from neighboring groups were killed, and in 2009, the Ngogo chimpanzees expanded into an area previously inhabited by their rivals, boosting their territory by 2.5 square miles (6.4 square kilometres) or 22%.

The records revealed that in the three years before the territorial expansion, the female Ngogo chimps gave birth to 15 offspring. But in the three years after it, they gave birth to 37 youngsters, more than doubling their fertility rate.

What's more, the infants born after the expansion were more likely to survive: they went from having a 41% chance of dying before the age of 3 to just an 8% chance of it. The study was published Nov. 17 in the journal PNAS.

"At the time, it was very obvious to the field workers that the chimpanzees were experiencing a baby boom. We expected to see that in the data, but not the boost to survivorship," Wood told Live Science.

The work provides the best evidence yet that, for chimpanzees, expanding territory after killing off rivals can directly boost reproductive success, he said. The chimpanzees’ territorial expansion gave them access to more food, and the subsequent improvement in nutrition and health probably led to higher female fertility and better survival rates among the young, Wood added.

The boost to survival rates could come down to two factors. The first, Wood said, is an improvement in the health and energy of the mothers, and the other the removal of rival males.

"The survival being higher makes sense because a major source of mortality for chimpanzee babies is getting killed by their neighbours," Michael Wilson, who studies the behavior and biology of chimpanzees at the University of Minnesota and wasn't involved in the study, told Live Science. "What this study supports is the idea that under certain conditions, it is adaptive to defend group resources and kill members of neighbouring groups. The chimpanzees are looking out for their own group, essentially."

Yet, if there is a benefit for the winners, there will be a cost to the losers, Wood said. He thinks it is likely to be a zero-sum game and there would probably be no overall gain in chimpanzee numbers because while the victors benefit, others lose.

The scientists behind the study claim that the findings could help shed light on the evolution of violence in humans. Because there is lethal violence in our closest living relatives — chimpanzees and bonobos (Pan paniscus) — some scientists have previously suggested this trait may have been present in our shared common ancestor, which probably lived six or seven million years ago, Wood said.

Competition over access to land and resources is still an ever-present part of the human condition, he said, but it is generally transformed by the human ability to mediate and avoid conflict.

"Ongoing conflict in the world over resources has echoes of what chimps are up to, but I don't think that's a favourable comparison if you happen to be involved," Wood said.

In general, there's a striking difference between humans and chimpanzees when it comes to intergroup relations, Wilson said. "If a chimpanzee sees a male from a neighbouring group, the only way he can benefit is by imposing some cost on that male, taking his territory or taking his life."

When people see a stranger from another group, there is a chance that they can benefit from interacting with them, he said.

It is this that has allowed humans to create multi-level societies with ties of trade, kinship and ritual forming larger units of social organization.

"In the modern world, the benefits from intergroup interactions have grown so enormous and the costs of war have also multiplied so enormously that it's generally a pretty dumb idea to start a war," Wilson said.

So why do kittens often not resemble their close relations, whereas most human siblings look similar to each other? The answer comes down to the complicated nature of cat coat genetics and a phenomenon in cat ovulation.

The genetics of cat coat color

The Cat Fanciers' Association recognizes dozens of coat colors and patterns, including everything from basic solid colors to more distinctive patterns, like the Bengal's rosetted tabby coat or the Abyssinian's ticked fur. All of those variations stem from a complex system of interacting genes.

"There are a number of different genes involved in cat color and pattern, and it's particularly complicated because some genes overwrite other genes," Jonathan Losos, a professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis and author of "The Cat's Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa" (Viking, 2023), told Live Science.

Different genes control solid coat colors, spotting, patterns and hair length. According to Losos, these genes come in a "hierarchy" — for example, one gene mutation for white fur, called dominant white, will override any other colors. Other genes control patterns such as tabby fur, and these work in combination with genes for color to produce a coat. Some cat coat colors are also sex-linked, meaning the gene is contained on the X chromosome, so the range of colors and patterns for male and female cats is different. In general, only female cats have calico or tortoiseshell patterns.

If all of these gene variations are hard to keep track of, that's the point. Even a few different combinations of a handful of genes can have drastically different outcomes for coat color, pattern and length, and that's one big reason cat littermates can look so different even when they have most of the same genes. But there's another factor that makes the genetics of cat litters even more complicated.

Multiple paternity

Female cats are induced ovulators, which means their reproductive system doesn't release eggs until they've already mated with a male. This increases the chance of successful fertilization, but it also comes with a catch: The female can release multiple eggs during this time, so if she mates with another tomcat in the next few days, she can become pregnant by multiple males.

That means kittens in the same litter can have more than one father, so some siblings are only 25% genetically related to each other, leaving a lot more room for variation in their appearance. This phenomenon is called heteropaternal superfecundation, and it's actually not that rare in the animal kingdom; dogs, sheep and cows can also have multiple births with more than one father. In extremely rare cases, heteropaternal superfecundation has even been documented in humans.

"I don't think it's unusual that cats do this," Losos said.

Scientists don't know exactly why heteropaternal superfecundation is so common in cats, but there are theories.

For one, induced ovulation could be a more resourceful way to go about mating, and heteropaternal superfecundation is a side effect of induced ovulation. "It might be an evolutionary adaptation that allows the mating process to be more efficient," Bruce Kornreich, director of the Cornell Feline Health Center, told Live Science. He explained that releasing eggs only after mating prevents eggs from being "wasted" so that the female cat's reproductive system doesn't use energy on unneeded eggs.

Multiple paternity within a litter could even have its own advantages, Losos noted. When littermates have different fathers, it increases the genetic diversity of cat families, which is generally good for survival.

Heteropaternal superfecundation is much more likely to occur in urban areas, where the concentration of cats is high and tomcat territories are likely to overlap. In fact, one 1999 study found that 70% to 83% of urban cat litters had more than one father, whereas only zero to 22% of rural litters had more than one father, making diverse litters the norm rather than the exception.

Cat quiz: Can you get a purr-fect score?

"I've never heard of an actual instance of them circling a dying human. There probably aren't that many dying humans out there to get anyway," said Chris McClure at The Peregrine Fund, who leads the Global Raptor Impact Network (GRIN), a tool to gather data on birds of prey.

Instead, "vultures are soaring animals and so they ride what are called thermals," he told Live Science.

These thermals are columns of rising air caused by the sun unevenly heating Earth's surface. Warmer air is less dense than cooler air, so above heated ground, pockets of air become lighter and rise, creating an updraft.

Typically, the thermals are tornado shaped: They are small and weak near the ground, forcing vultures to turn in small circles when low down, but as the air gets warmer higher up, the thermals get larger, and the birds move in larger circles, a 2017 study revealed.

Vultures, and other raptors like eagles, buzzards and kites, use these thermals as invisible elevators to gain altitude, and then as highways to travel around while expending little energy. The birds can either stay circling the same thermal, or use some extra energy to flap off in search of another free ride.

So most of the time when you see a vulture circling, it is just staying up there where the thermals are best, saving energy and looking for carrion, or a dead animal, to eat, McClure said, or perhaps sniffing it out — some species, such as turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) have an excellent sense of smell and pick up the scent of a chemical called ethyl mercaptan released as a dead body decays to find carrion in dense forests without seeing visual cues.

Once the birds have located potential food, they may circle to check that the animal is indeed dead and whether any large carnivores have already opened up the carcass — which makes it easier for a vulture to eat — and that the coast is now clear so the birds can safely descend.

The biggest misconception about vultures, however, is that they spread disease, said McClure. The birds eat dead and decaying animal carcasses including roadkill, but they are preventing disease rather than spreading it. "We call them nature's cleanup crew," he said.

This is because vulture stomachs contain a mix of strong acid and lethal bacteria, and if they feed on an animal carcass infected with anthrax, rabies, salmonella or cholera, for example, the pathogens are killed off in their stomachs and can no longer spread.

"Vultures are incredibly important for ecosystems," McClure said. "They eat carrion, and they eat lots of it."

One key example of this was when the number of Indian vultures declined precipitously, McClure said. The birds were once ubiquitous there, but more than two decades ago, they began dying because of the use of diclofenac, a non-steroidal painkiller for cattle.

Vultures that fed on carcasses of animals treated with the drug got kidney failure and died. By the mid-1990s, the vulture population had plummeted to near-zero. This meant bacteria and infections, including rabies, spread from infected carcasses that the vultures would otherwise have eaten, leading to the deaths of about half a million people between 2000 and 2005.

Tracking vultures with GPS units also provides people with another benefit, McClure said, by helping identify where poaching is happening. "There are maybe thousands of vultures out there with GPS units on them, transmitting their whereabouts. A really cool thing we are doing in Africa is using GPS-tagged vultures to catch poachers," he said. This is because vultures find carcasses before the authorities do and congregate around it. If there are a lot of vultures, it means there's a big carcass, so it might be poaching, he said.

The newly-sighted cetaceans are ginkgo-toothed beaked whales (Mesoplodon ginkgodens), which were previously only known from dead individuals that had washed ashore and from bycatch. This isn't all that unusual for beaked whales, which are deep divers and notoriously cryptic, spending their lives away from coastlines.

"Beaked whales are the largest least-known animals left on the planet," study co-author Robert Pitman, an affiliate of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, told Live Science in an email. "It is exciting to think that there [are] still organisms here on earth that weigh over a ton and have never been identified alive in the wild."

The hunt for and subsequent discovery of the elusive creatures was sparked by a recording of a distinct echolocation pulse in the North Pacific. Researchers began searching for the animals responsible for the mysterious sonar signal in 2020, and in June of 2024, it led them to a single beaked whale. Within days of that sighting, the team then found a small group of the whales, including a battle-scarred adult male and adult female with a calf.

Beaked whale species can be difficult to tell apart, so simply observing the whales wasn't enough to identify them. The team only confirmed what they had seen after collecting a DNA sample by shooting one of the whales with a crossbow. (Don't worry, the whale is fine.)

The researchers published their findings online July 28 in the journal Marine Mammal Science, which will appear in the upcoming January 2026 issue of the journal. Study lead author Elizabeth Henderson, a bioacoustic researcher at the Naval Information Warfare Center, Pacific, said that the findings demonstrated the benefits of determination and not giving up.

"Myself and some of the other folks on this trip (Gustavo Cardenas, Jay Barlow) spent five years looking for these whales; we spent every year since 2020 searching off Baja to find them, and that effort and determination paid off with a huge reward," Henderson told Live Science in an email.

Ginkgo-toothed beaked whales are so named because the males have a pair of teeth that resemble the fan-shaped leaves of a ginkgo tree. For the whales, almost all of this shape is hidden in the jaw and gum tissue, with only the tip of each tooth visible on either side of their mouth. The teeth grow into small tusks as the males mature, and aren’t for eating, but are used as weapons.

"They feed on small squids and fishes by suction feeding, so they don’t need teeth," Pitman said. "As a result, females are toothless their entire lives, but males retain a single pair of enlarged teeth in the lower jaw that they use as tusks to fight over access to reproductive females."

When the team finally tracked down the whales, they saw that one adult male was seemingly battle-hardened with a worn tusk, bruising and scars. The other whales the researchers recorded across six separate observations were marked, too, and not just from other whales. Their scars included distinctive white blobs indicative of bites from cookiecutter sharks — little sock puppet-like fish that feed by ripping cookie-shaped chunks out of larger animals.

The team documented the whales with binocular observations, photographs and hydrophones (underwater microphones). During the fifth encounter, one of the whales swam within 66 feet (20 meters) of the stern of the researchers' ship, which is when Pitman fired his 150-pound (68-kilogram) draw-weight crossbow loaded with a modified punch-tip arrow.

"The crossbow arrow ('bolt') extracts a tiny, pencil-eraser-sized plug of skin and blubber," Pitman said. "We have collected thousands over the years, from dozens of whale and dolphin species."

Henderson compared the crossbow shot to an ear-piercing gun, while Pitman noted that any one of the whales' cookicutter shark bites probably took 50 times more tissue than the crossbow. The arrow didn't stick in the whale, so the researchers could retrieve it and the tissue. With a sample in the bag, the researchers then sent the tissue to a geneticist for testing.

"It took a few days to process the material and run the tests, and we were all waiting with [bated] breath," Henderson said. "When we got the results back we were all a bit shocked — while they did look like that species, this was not the expected area of their distribution so we had discounted that as a possibility — but we were also thrilled to finally have the mystery solved."

Ginkgo-toothed beaked whale strandings are fairly common in the western Pacific, but only two individuals have ever been recorded stranding in the eastern Pacific. The researchers had initially suspected that the whales they were seeing were Perrin's beaked whales (Mesoplodon perrini), which Pitman said are known from only six stranded specimens off southern California and are the least known marine mammals (and large animals) in the world.

Pitman noted that the team now hopes to go looking for Perrin’s beaked whales and the two other species of beaked whales that have yet to be identified alive in the wild, putting faces to more underwater calls.

"This is important because once we match up the calls to all the individual species, then we can use passive acoustic monitoring (towing hydrophones behind vessels, drifter buoys, etc.) and finally learn where these whales live, how many there are, and how vulnerable they are to human disturbances, especially high-seas fisheries," Pitman said.

"When I was a kid, you could go out driving in the summer, and you would come home and your car windshield was covered in bugs," said Cheryl Schultz, an ecologist at Washington State University. "Now, you can go across many areas at the same time of year and your windshield is clean."

This phenomenon, called the "windshield test," is indicative of a larger, very worrying trend: Insects, particularly the flying ones that pollinate many crops, are in steep decline. This nosedive is disrupting ecosystems around the world, and could jeopardize the global food supply. But tracking the decrease of insect populations over the past three decades has proved tricky — and stopping the decline may be even harder.

However, researchers are working quickly to find ways to stem the tide and even reverse the trend. Key to that is a collaborative approach that includes local and federal conservation efforts, new pollinator habitats, and a reduction in pesticide use.

The age of the "insect apocalypse"

Both the total number of insects and the number of insect species have been declining for decades in pretty much every place scientists have looked — prompting researchers to dub it "the insect apocalypse." Global bee biodiversity is down 25% compared with pre-1995 numbers, according to research published in 2021. A sweeping 2025 study showed that butterfly abundance across the U.S. fell by 22% over the past two decades. And a study in Germany found a whopping 76% loss of flying insects in some of the country's forested areas over 27 years.

"It's a worrisome thing," Scott Black, executive director of the nonprofit Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, told Live Science.

By and large, experts know why insects are becoming scarcer. The first factor is climate change. As the planet warms, key host plants for insects start to bloom earlier each year. This can cause a mismatch in life cycles for certain species, putting many newly hatched or metamorphosed bugs out of sync with their food sources. And extreme heat, reduced snowpack, severe storms and megadroughts can chip away at previously robust insect numbers. Many populations simply can't keep up. Meanwhile, milder winters can benefit a few adaptable pest species, which may outcompete sensitive insects and wreak ecological and agricultural havoc in some regions.

The second driver is habitat loss — the inexorable creep of urbanization, deforestation and sterile suburban lawns, which host fewer and less-diverse ranges of insects. As humans encroach on insect habitats, insects like ground-dwelling bees are left without space to build nests, rear young and overwinter, leading to population declines.

Finally, there are pesticides. For instance, neonicotinoids (often labeled as the active ingredients acetamiprid, clothianidin, dinotefuran, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam), have been identified as a major threat to wild bees, and they're still used in the U.S. and some other industrialized countries, including parts of Canada and Australia. Other pesticides, like the common weed killer glyphosate, have been shown to weaken bees' ability to regulate hive temperature, leaving them vulnerable to plunging winter temperatures.

"It's really extremely rapid environmental changes that we're seeing," Roel van Klink, a researcher at the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research, told Live Science. "Those species that were adapted to the conditions that we had maybe 50 or 100 years ago are not adapted to the conditions now anymore. And so they go down."

Collecting data on the scale and scope of these declines has been challenging, however. For one thing, some insects are easier to find than others. Flying insects like beetles and dragonflies are much more mobile, and therefore easier to spot, than earthbound bugs like earwigs and ants. Likewise, charismatic insects like bees and butterflies tend to have more historical records of their numbers and are usually easier to identify.

But there's another reason these insects' declines have gotten more scientific attention: They are extremely important for global food security.

The importance of diverse pollinators

Disappearing insects are bad news for the global food system. As the world's population continues to grow, the stress that insect declines — and dropping pollinator numbers, in particular — put on the food system could lead to an agricultural economic collapse, as well as increased food scarcity.

"Preventing further declines is no longer enough," Francesca Mancini, an ecological modeler at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, told Live Science. "We need to restore insect biodiversity to past levels."

In the U.K. alone, insect pollinators provide an estimated $1 billion in economic value each year, Mancini said. For the U.S., it's in the ballpark of $34 billion.

Worldwide, three-quarters of the crops we eat — and just over one-third of total crop yields — depend on pollination by insects. The degree to which these crops rely on pollinators falls along a spectrum. Some, like soybeans, would be much less productive without insect pollination. Others would cease to exist. "Coffee and chocolate are actually 100% dependent on pollination by insects," van Klink said.

A lot of that pollination work is done by managed European honeybees (Apis mellifera), which beekeepers around the world diligently maintain, transport and unleash upon fields across the globe each year. But to flourish, many crops need more than just honeybees.

For example, fruits native to North America, like blueberries and tomatoes (which is technically a fruit), are more effectively pollinated by native bumblebees, such as Bombus fraternus. That's because bumblebees can perform what's known as "buzz pollination," where they land on a flower and vibrate rapidly to release even the most deeply held pollen grains. Cacao trees (Theobroma cacao) — the source of the cocoa beans used to make chocolate — are entirely pollinated by chocolate midges. And cotton yields would plummet by up to 50% without butterfly pollinators.

Some staple crops, like soybeans, can make it without insects. However, research has shown that soybean fields visited by pollinators have significantly higher yields.

Then, there are crops like alfalfa (Medicago sativa). This legume isn't widely consumed by humans, but it is a staple for livestock — particularly dairy and beef cattle. Like blueberries and tomatoes, alfalfa depends on insect pollinators to thrive. However, honeybees will only pollinate it reluctantly; given the choice, they'd rather buzz around plants with flowers that are easier for them to access. But wild bees, particularly the alfalfa leaf-cutting bee (Megachile rotundata), are extremely effective alfalfa pollinators.

A recent study found that alfalfa fields visited by a mix of honeybees, wild bees and other pollinators, like wasps and butterflies, produced significantly more and larger seeds than fields visited by honeybees alone. This higher yield translates to more food for cattle — and thus more milk, cheeseburgers and steaks for us.

Glimmers of hope

Of course, restoring insect abundance and biodiversity is no easy task, especially in the face of an all-encompassing threat like global climate change. Experts told Live Science that coordinated federal regulations aimed at slowing climate change, reducing industrial pesticide use, and preventing the destruction of wild spaces are essential for protecting insects. But there are also actions people can take at the local and personal level that can have a positive impact.

Although the current U.S. administration's cuts to federal science programs and green energy have dealt a harsh blow to progress on these fronts, many experts still see reasons for optimism.

"As much as the overall picture is overwhelming, there's lots of places for hope," Schultz told Live Science. In a detailed report about the state of U.S. butterflies written this year in collaboration with the Xerces Society, Schultz highlighted a number of "success stories" — species that bucked the trend and increased in abundance thanks to years of focused work at both the federal and local levels.

Chief among them is the Fender's blue (Icaricia icarioides fenderi), a tiny azure butterfly native to Oregon. In 2000, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed it as endangered. In 2023, it became the second-ever insect to be downlisted to "threatened."

And the benefits of conservation efforts for one species had knock-on effects: Of the 342 butterfly species and subspecies analyzed in the report, 65 others had increased in number, and most were not on the endangered species list. This suggests that protections to conserve one insect could benefit others as well.

Increasing healthy habitat

One of the best ways to help butterflies and other pollinators is to create more habitat for them. Unlike grizzly bears or elk, these insects don't need large stretches of unbroken wilderness. Even something as small as a backyard butterfly garden or a flower-filled window box can go a long way, Wendy Leuenberger, an ecologist at Michigan State University, told Live Science.

One study in the Pacific Northwest found that converting a 5,400-square-foot (500 square meter) plot of land — roughly half the size of the average American lawn — into an insect-friendly habitat full of native or wild plants can increase pollinator species' richness and abundance by about 90%. However, that effect was fairly localized, and it dissipated when these patches were placed in plots of more than 150,000 square meters (37 acres) — about the size of seven or eight blocks in Chicago.

Some pollinators, like hoverflies (Syrphidae spp.) and certain types of bees, can cover miles in search of flowering plants. But others, including many butterflies, tend to stay closer to home — within a 650-foot 200 meter radius for more delicate species. This suggests that plots of native or wild flora are most effective at bolstering our food supply when interspersed within larger agricultural fields.

"I would say it's the closer, the better for your crops," Andy Grinstead, a conservation manager at Pollinator Partnership, told Live Science.

In agricultural communities, experts like Grinstead recommend planting "buffer strips" of native vegetation near (or, if possible, in between) crops. He also suggests planting hedgerows of woody, flowering plants around fields to act as both pollinator habitat and wind protection. But you don't have to be a farmer to support pollinators. Folks living within a few miles of farms can plant "bee lawns," which are filled with low-growing flowering plants like clover, instead of pure turfgrass.

And for those without yards, growing micro-plots of native wildflowers — even just a pot on a rooftop or balcony or hanging from a window — can create green "stepping stones" for bees, hoverflies, migratory butterflies and beetles passing through urban areas.

"Pollinator-friendly practices are valuable across all landscapes," Grinstead said. "It takes very little space to actually make an impact."

Reducing pesticide use on an industrial scale can also benefit pollinators, Black said.

One way to do this is to adopt an integrated pest management framework. This can mean rotating crops to keep soil healthy; accurately identifying pests before applying pesticides; and carefully spraying in targeted areas (away from blooms) when the wind is low to prevent the pesticides from drifting into the surrounding environment.

But even home gardeners can help reduce pesticides by replacing lawns or ornamental plants with hardier native species, hand-weeding rather than blanket-spraying small plots, and using screens or draining standing water instead of spraying for pests like mosquitoes, Black said. Taken together, these actions can help create havens where pollinators can thrive.

Taking action

Crucially, scientists are still researching the full scope of global insect declines, especially for species that have been historically understudied. This means we need field research to estimate insect numbers, Black said.

Community pollinator counts, whether as part of a formal program or through apps like iNaturalist, are also essential, Leuenberger told Live Science. These data help experts pinpoint which species are most vulnerable and which conservation efforts are most effective.

But with the future of the global food system hanging in the balance, it's important to try to restore these numbers now — not wait till researchers have published comprehensive data on how and where insect numbers are plummeting, Black said. "We don't want to wait until we have everything tucked into a perfect paper before we take action," he said. "We know how to take action."

The researchers found that these intermediate roars always follow full-throated roars. The discovery reveals that lion vocalizations are more complex than previously thought, said study lead author Jonathan Growcott, a doctoral student in mathematics and statistics at the University of Exeter in the U.K.

"The full-throated roar is an explosion of sound. Loud and complex and arcs in pitch," Growcott told Live Science in an email. "The intermediary roar differs by being a flatter sound with less variation."

The discovery, published Friday (Nov. 21) in the journal Ecology and Evolution, challenges the long-held belief that there is only one kind of lion roar, and it could help researchers estimate lion population sizes more accurately, he said.

Lions roar to communicate with their pride and establish their territory. Previous research has indicated that lions' full-throated roars are unique, individually identifiable signatures that contain information about an animal's sex, age and other characteristics. This suggests sound recordings can help scientists count the number of lions in a landscape and thus make population density estimates, Growcott said.

For the study, the researchers deployed 50 custom-built microphones in Tanzania's Nyerere National Park and attached acoustic sensors to collars on five lions in Zimbabwe's Bubye Valley Conservancy area. In total, the team recorded 3,149 African lion (Panthera leo) vocalizations.

The team then used artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse the sounds, which revealed the intermediate roar.

Without AI, understanding full-throated roars and identifying lions based on their vocalizations has always been subjective, Growcott said. Lions also make other sounds — including grunts, snarls, chuffs, moans and mews — but only full-throated roars have been shown to hold identifiable signatures, so it is important to identify these roars correctly and extract as much information as possible from them.

The researchers' AI model enabled them to classify lion vocalization types with over 95% accuracy, largely removing the bias that is introduced when researchers try to characterize lion calls manually. This approach also made it easier to identify individual lions based on their full-throated roars, and highlighted the previously unknown intermediate roar — knowledge of which will help researchers to isolate full-throated roars in the future.

"This new method which proves that intermediary roars exist and are different to the full-throated roar is an important first step for ensuring consistency in selecting full-throated roars," Growcott said.

There are only about 23,000 African lions left in the wild, making the species vulnerable to extinction, according to the IUCN Red List. Traditional methods to estimate lion population sizes include camera traps and spoor surveys, but these require large resources and may be less accurate than acoustic surveys.

"I hope that using data-driven predicted full-throated roars will lead to more accurate acoustic population density estimates which can better inform the pressing needs of conservation," Growcott said.

Big cats quiz: Can you get the lion's share of these questions right?

Researchers arrived a few minutes late to the scene, so they aren't entirely sure what sparked the ferocious act, which lasted around 30 minutes. However, they suspect the male bonobo may have tried to harm one of their infants, the authors reported Oct. 6 in the journal Current Biology.

"We didn't see the onset of the attack, but it's hard to explain in other ways, like what's the function of this remarkably extreme violence," study lead author Sonya Pashchevskaya, a doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, told Live Science.

There has been only one other documented case of such an attack, in a different bonobo population around 186 miles (300 kilometers) away, and that appeared to be punishment for attempted infanticide, she explained.

This recent assault, which happened Feb. 18 in the LuiKotale bonobo community in Salonga National Park, is the most extreme case of violence in a wild bonobo population to date and challenges the stereotype of bonobos being the nonviolent "hippies" of the primate world.

Bonobos (Pan paniscus), along with chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), are our closest living relatives. But unlike chimpanzees, bonobos have a reputation for "making love, not war," with individuals frequently using sex to relieve tensions.

However, male-male aggression is still common, and female bonobos are known to team up to fight males who threaten them or their young. This female "coalitionary" behavior seems to underpin the female dominance hierarchy in the species and could explain the "lack of lethal aggression or infanticide" in bonobo societies, the authors noted in the study.

There was nothing untoward on the morning of the attack. "It was a usual data collection day," Pashchevskaya noted. The team, which included local field assistants and research assistants, were following small subgroups of bonobos from the roughly 60-strong LuiKotale community through the forest.

Suddenly, bonobo screams erupted from roughly 0.3 miles (0.5 km) away. Pashchevskaya assumed the high-pitched screeches were excitement from catching small antelope prey.

"The bonobos who I was with at that time, they all just drop from the trees and start sprinting down there," she said. She followed in hot pursuit and arrived at the scene just a few minutes after it all started.

"First thing that immediately happens is, I smell blood," Pashchevskaya recalled. When the team spotted a group of five females stomping on, beating and biting a male lying head down on the ground, she realized this was not about an antelope hunt.

The male victim, a 19-year-old called Hugo, lost most of his hair in the assault, as well multiple toes, part of his ear, and the flesh on his knuckles. The assailants then licked his blood off their fingers.

No group member tried to intervene, despite the entire community being present. "Everybody is very silent. It's like a forest with bonobos has never been so quiet," Pashchevskaya said. "This is nothing I've ever seen before."

Two days before, Pashchevskaya noticed Hugo trying to grab one of the attacker's infants, which the team speculated may have sparked the attack as an act of retaliation.

"Of course, this is just one observation two days before, but if this kept happening, it could have potentially triggered an attack," she said. "Other females would join this potentially, because this is then someone they can also recruit [in the future]."

Hugo eventually managed to walk away, but has since been missing, leading the team to suspect he died from his injuries. "There's no way he survived," Pashchevskaya said.

Nahoko Tokuyama, a primatologist who researches bonobos at Chuo University in Japan but was not involved in the recent work documenting the attack, said that although she wasn't surprised by the group assault, she did not expect such grave injuries.

"I had previously believed that wild female bonobos, while sometimes becoming violent, would not injure an opponent to such a severe extent," Tokuyama told Live Science in an email.

However, she cautioned that Hugo may still be alive. "Bonobos have a fission-fusion society, and it is possible for a male to spend long periods alone," she said. "In our long-term studies, we have had cases where males who had not been seen for several months returned to the group, so the question of whether Hugo died needs to be considered more carefully."

Using photos uploaded to the citizen science platform iNaturalist, researchers found that raccoons in urban environments had shorter snouts than their rural counterparts. The difference could be one of several traits that make up "domestication syndrome," the scientists wrote in a study published Oct. 2 in the journal Frontiers in Zoology.

Domesticated animals typically become less aggressive toward humans over time. They gradually develop a relationship in which people provide for them in exchange for resources, such as meat and milk from livestock or labor from herding dogs. That process often involves selectively breeding animals for certain desirable traits, but it doesn't always begin that way.

"I wanted to know if living in a city environment would kickstart domestication processes in animals that are currently not domesticated," study co-author Raffaela Lesch, a zoologist at the University of Arkansas Little Rock, said in a statement. "Would raccoons be on the pathway to domestication just by hanging out in close proximity to humans?"

Domestication begins when animals adapt to a new niche created by the presence of humans. For raccoons, that niche might involve rooting around in our trash bins.

"Trash is really the kickstarter," Lesch said. That waste makes for an easy meal for the critters. "All they have to do is endure our presence, not be aggressive, and then they can feast on anything we throw away."

In the new study, Lesch and a team of 16 students looked for early signs of domestication in raccoons in the United States. Physical signs that a species is becoming domesticated often include shorter snouts, floppy ears, white spots and a reduced fear response — a series of traits collectively called "domestication syndrome."

Drawing from nearly 20,000 photos uploaded to iNaturalist, the team found that the snouts of raccoons living in densely populated areas were about 3.5% shorter than those of raccoons in more rural counties.

These seemingly unrelated "domestication syndrome" traits tend to arise early in domestication and may be linked thanks to mutations that occur during an animal's development. In 2014, scientists proposed that mutations in neural crest cells, a type of stem cell that forms in vertebrate embryos, could cause these changes.

The new findings seem to support that hypothesis, the researchers wrote in the study. A reduced fear response helps animals like raccoons take advantage of human environments, so natural selection might make that bravery more common in urban environments. Changes in snout length early in domestication could suggest that the two traits are linked, the team said.

Future studies will investigate whether the same pattern holds for other urban mammals, such as opossums, according to the statement.

"This will help inform us if human presence is enough to already start the process of domestication in a species," Lesch said.

Invading parasitic ant queens trick ant workers from different colonies into killing and dismembering their own mother, so the invader can step in and take the throne, according to a new study.

The parasite appears to infiltrate the colony then sprays the reigning queen with formic acid.

"The queen's odour is wiped out by the formic acid, and in an instant the individual whom workers most urgently protect turns into a vicious menace. For the host queen and for the workers alike, it is nothing but a nightmare," study lead author Keizo Takasuka, a biologist at Kyushu University in Japan, told Live Science in an email.

Some species of ants, such as Lasius orientalis and Lasius umbratus, operate as social parasites. Rather than starting their own colony from scratch, the queens from these species infiltrate the colonies of other species, such as Lasius flavus and Lasius japonicus, and take them over, making the workers serve them instead.

Scientists already knew that these invading queens use stolen scents to disguise themselves as a member of the colony. This works because ant vision is limited and the nest is dark, so workers rely heavily on odors for recognition and decision-making.

But they were still unsure how the invader convinced the worker daughters to kill their own mother. To investigate, Takasuka and his colleagues studied the ants' behavior in the lab. The findings were published Monday (Nov. 17) in the journal Current Biology.

First, they put an invading queen with host workers and cocoons to make sure she acquired the right scent, Takasuka said.

This scent acquisition mimics what would happen in the wild, Daniel Kronauer at the Rockefeller University in New York, who wasn't involved in the study, told Live Science. "You sometimes see these queens outside of the colonies of host species and they chew on host workers and groom themselves with the chemicals of the host workers, so they can acquire a kind of invisibility," he said.

Next, the researchers introduced an L. orientalis queen into an L. flavus nest, and an L. umbratus queen into an L. japonicus nest.

The invading queens were largely accepted by the workers and made their way towards the host queens.

Each parasite queen sprayed the host queen with abdominal fluid then quickly retreated as the agitated workers turned on their own queen and attacked her. If the host queen survived the onslaught, the parasite queen returned to spray her again, until eventually the host queen was killed and dismembered by her own daughters.

The ants can spray formic acid, which has a sharp, vinegar-like smell, when threatened — and this is what Takasuka thinks they are spraying at the host queen.

"When they get attacked, ants often spray the intruder with formic acid as a way of alerting other ants in the colony," Kronauer said. "So, it makes a lot of sense that this would be repurposed by the parasite queen. Basically, she's telling them that the queen is an intruder by spraying her with formic acid, and that's what triggers the attack."

When the situation has calmed down, the parasitic queen begins laying eggs of her own and the workers take care of her and her offspring. At this point, the workers are constantly crawling over her, and she blends into the general smell of the colony, Kronauer said, "so, the parasite queen doesn't have to keep killing workers and chewing on them."

Eventually the old workers die out and the parasite queen has a brood that is all her offspring.

In some other parasitic ant species, the invader queen kills the incumbent herself. Matricide, or offspring killing their mother, is unusual in nature, and when it does happen it tends to be for the benefit of the species, like a hump earwig (Anechura harmandi) mother offering herself up as food for her nymphs, or wasps killing their queen in an effort to boost the diversity within the colony.

But in the case of these ants, only the parasite species profits. "It's a manipulative behavior that is selfish from the perspective of the social parasite. And what the resident workers do is a very dumb, non-adaptive thing to do," Kronauer said.

The process of metamorphosis is so strange, it almost seems like science fiction. So how did such a peculiar life cycle evolve in the first place?

The answer traces back about 480 million years ago, to the very first insects on Earth. These bugs didn't undergo major metamorphic changes throughout their lives, fossil evidence suggests; they simply emerged from their eggs as smaller versions of their adult selves. As they aged, they molted their skin to grow larger and larger. Today, there are still some insects that don't undergo metamorphosis, such as silverfish (Lepisma saccharinum) and jumping bristletails (in the order Archaeognatha).

But according to James Truman, a biologist and professor emeritus at the University of Washington, something changed about 400 million years ago. Small genetic mutations caused the adult and juvenile phases of insects to look different — a phenomenon called incomplete metamorphosis. Rather than hatching as tiny versions of their adult selves, insects that undergo incomplete metamorphosis — called hemimetabolous insects — start their lives in what's called the nymph phase.

Nymphs still roughly resemble their adult relatives, but they also have little pads where wings will grow. Each time the nymph molts, the wing pads develop further, until their final molt reveals functional adult wings. Those wings are what made incomplete metamorphosis such a big evolutionary step forward for insects — wings are so delicate that it would be difficult to hatch with fully functional wings, so it was easier for wings to develop with the insects throughout their lives.

After roughly another 50 million years, Truman said, more genetic mutations changed the early life stages of insects even further. These genetic shifts created holometabolous insects, which are insects that undergo complete metamorphosis. Rather than hatching out of their eggs as nymphs, these insects started to emerge as larvae — worm-like creatures that look nothing like their parents.

"The identity of the parents is [in] no way reflected in the identity of the young. There's just no resemblance at all," Truman told Live Science. "The [Latin] term for 'larva' means 'mask,' and indeed, the larval stage masks the adult stage."

Evolutionary benefits

Today, there are about 5.5 million insect species on Earth, and more than 80% of them undergo complete metamorphosis. Metamorphosis has likely been such a success because it provides insects with many evolutionary advantages, the first of which was flight. Hemimetabolous insects were the first animals to develop functional wings, and they took to the skies far before any vertebrates did.

"For 100 million years, the insects had the air as their playground," Truman said. "It's this ability that really allowed insects to take over."

Complete metamorphosis has even more advantages. Because the larval and adult life stages are so different, juveniles and adults can specialize in different things; generally, larvae spend most of their time eating, whereas adult insects are more concerned with reproducing. In some cases, the adults of some species, such as luna moths (Actias luna), don't even have functional mouths; after metamorphosis, they spend the rest of their short lives finding a mate and never eat again.

Metamorphosis also brings benefits related to resource competition, Truman said, because adults and larvae can eat entirely different diets. In many species, larvae often feed on short-lasting resources, such as carcasses and worms, whereas adults feed on longer-lasting resources, such as nectar. This means the larvae and young aren't competing for the same food, so greater numbers of each age group can survive.

Metamorphosis mysteries

While the evolutionary advantages of complete metamorphosis are clear, the details of how this complex process first evolved remain murky.

"There are two main schools," Xavier Bellés Ros, an ad honorem researcher at the Spanish National Research Council, told Live Science in an email.

One idea, supported by Bellés Ros, proposes that complete metamorphosis evolved as the nymph stage split into the larval and pupal phases. The opposing camp, supported by researchers including Truman, argues that the larval stage originated from an embryonic phase known as the pronymph, the brief phase when an insect first begins to emerge from its egg.

Scientists do know some of the key genes that control the larval, pupal and adult stages of insects with complete metamorphosis. "Each stage seems to be controlled by a master regulatory gene," Truman said. What remains unclear is how those same genes function in simpler insects that develop without such drastic transformations.

Still, researchers say the enduring mysteries of metamorphosis are part of its appeal.

"After 30 years of working with it (and I'm still working), I've only unraveled a few mysteries," Bellés Ros said. "There's still a lot of work to be done, work that should prove fascinating for future generations of entomologists."

Evolution quiz: Can you naturally select the correct answers?

RNA, or ribonucleic acid, carries instructions between DNA and an organism's protein-building machinery, acting as a messenger to turn genetic information into proteins. RNA can reveal which genes are active in a cell at a given moment, as well as how gene-activity patterns within a cell change over time. Thus, ancient RNA can inform scientists about the cellular states of extinct species.

Although the technology behind ancient DNA research has surged over the past 20 years, ancient RNA research has seen few successes. This is due in part to its construction, as DNA molecules are double-stranded and therefore sturdier than the single-stranded RNA.

While DNA offers the blueprint of an organism, there are limits to the information it reveals. RNA "opens a window into how" that blueprint is implemented within each cell of the organism, said study co-author Zoé Pochon, a doctoral student at Stockholm University.

The aptly-named messenger RNA (mRNA) "is DNA's messenger," she told Live Science in an email. "In other words, it carries working copies of DNA instructions from the nucleus to the cell." Other parts of the cell then follow these instructions, she added.

In the new study, published Friday (Nov. 14) in the journal Cell, the researchers turned to 10 well-preserved woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenus) specimens from Siberia that dated to 10,000 to 50,000 years. The team hoped that the frozen conditions had preserved more of the specimens and so would produce better results.

One specimen in particular — Yuka, a ginger-colored juvenile mammoth — yielded spectacular results. Yuka is about 39,000 years old, making this the oldest RNA sequenced to date. Previously, that distinction was held by tissues sampled from a canid dated to approximately 14,300 years.

Remarkably, the scientists found definite genetic signals that Yuka, previously believed to be a female based on its physical attributes, is actually a male.

Additionally, the RNA offered insights into Yuka's muscle function — specifically, the RNA "creating the proteins that are stretching and contracting the muscles," said study lead author Emilio Mármol Sánchez, who was working at the Center for Evolutionary Hologenomics, University of Copenhagen at the time of the paper. The team "also found a whole set of regulatory genes,' he told Live Science.

When cells die, what is left behind is the last function of the RNA. "What we are capturing here is, in a sense, a snapshot of the last moments of the life of these mammoths" within their cells, Mármol Sánchez said.

What the team saw in Yuka's muscle RNA reflects the potential horror of its last moments. Mármol Sánchez explained that they uncovered "molecular evidence of metabolic cell stress in Yuka's muscle," which corresponds with what a separate scientific team described in 2021. In that study, the researchers noted many claw marks that may have been made by cave lions (Panthera spelaea), as well as bite marks from smaller predators on the mammoth's body and tail. But whether Yuka was hunted and killed by large predators or simply scavenged after death is unknown. The researchers do not know what caused the cell stress observed in the RNA.

Federico Sánchez Quinto, a paleogenomicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico's (UNAM) International Laboratory for Human Genome Research who was not involved in the research, considers this "a breakthrough publication in the field of paleogenomics." He described the study as "fascinating since it accomplishes something that had been previously unimaginable, as RNA is extremely unstable even in favorable conditions." Moreover, "this study obtains RNA from an older sample [than other recent RNA work], in larger amounts and with more certainty," he told Live Science in an email.

The findings have revealed that it's possible to extract RNA from extremely old specimens and showcases a new area of potential study for other researchers, the team said. In addition, the team has included a roadmap to help others successfully obtain ancient RNA.

"Being able to recover RNA from ancient samples, in addition to DNA, is like opening a new window into the biology of extinct animals," study co-author Love Dalén, professor of evolutionary genetics at the Centre for Palaeogenetics at Stockholm University, told Live Science. "It's yet another powerful tool that lets us see which genes were active in different cell types, which ultimately can help us better understand which genes made a mammoth a mammoth!”

The "hell pigs," scientifically known as Archaeotherium ("ancient beast" in Greek), were a group of pig-like creatures that could be as tall as humans while standing on four legs and potentially weigh more than 2,000 pounds (1,000 kilograms).

Researchers have known about Archaeotherium since 1850. But now, a new tooth analysis reveals that these beasts' feeding strategies were more varied than previously assumed. By examining tooth wear, researchers saw that larger species were crushing bones or other hard material, while smaller species were likely shearing soft foods, potentially giving them different roles on the ancient North American landscape.

"We can't assume that they were doing the same thing," Brynn Wooten, a doctoral candidate at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, told Live Science.

Wooten presented preliminary findings from her research Thursday (Nov. 13) at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology 2025 annual meeting. The findings haven't been peer-reviewed yet, as Wooten and her colleagues still have to complete their research and submit it to a journal.

Whale of a pig

Archaeotherium roamed across North America from about 37 million to 23 million years ago. Despite their vaguely hoggish appearance, Archaeotherium was more closely related to whales and hippos than to pigs. Their heads were around 30% of their total body length (it varied by species), but their small brains meant they weren't the brightest tools in the Paleogenic shed.

"Archaeotherium has a brain-to-body mass ratio similar to that of reptiles, so they were very unintelligent creatures," Wooten said. "Their heads were massive, but they had little tiny brain cases."

Researchers previously suggested that Archaeotherium could have been active predators, scavengers and/or vegetation strippers. Bite marks on the fossils of Poebrotherium — small camel relatives that used to roam North America — indicate that Archaeotherium may have hunted Poebrotherium and stored some of the carcasses for leftovers.

For the new research, Wooten and Larisa DeSantis, an associate professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt University, examined a variety of Archaeotherium teeth from different states, including Nebraska, South Dakota, Oregon and Colorado. By using dental microwear texture analysis, which involves creating 3D scans of the tooth surface with a powerful microscope, they could compare wear variation between the different Archaeotherium teeth.

On the whole, Archaeotherium was typically similar to peccaries (pig-like animals found in the Americas), which shear their food. However, wear on the larger-bodied Archaeotherium was statistically indistinguishable from that of lions and hyenas and indicative of an animal that crushed its food.

"It's really interesting that the large ones are capable of crunching bones," DeSantis told Live Science. "The small ones are not."

The crushing wear could mean that the larger species engaged in more scavenging behaviors, potentially using their great size to bully other predators off their kills, the researchers suggested. On the other hand, the larger Archaeotherium could have been consuming more hard vegetarian foods, such as tubers or woody browse. The soft veggie option for smaller Archaeotherium may have been leaves and grasses.

So far, the dental analysis reveals only the texture of Archaeotherium food — not which species they ate. Wooten will now explore other research techniques, including calcium isotope analysis, to confirm whether bone was part of Archaeotherium's diet.

The armor-plated reptile resembles a dinosaur but is actually an ancestor of modern crocodiles. Scientists have called the creature Tainrakuasuchus bellator, which is a mixture of Greek, Latin and Indigenous Brazilian language Guarani, meaning "pointed-tooth warrior crocodile." The team revealed its findings in a study published in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology on Nov. 13.

"Its discovery helps illuminate a key moment in the history of life, the period that preceded the rise of the dinosaurs," study lead author Rodrigo Temp Müller, a paleontologist at the Federal University of Santa Maria in Brazil, said in a statement.

During the Triassic (252 million to 201 million years ago), Archosaurs dominated the world of land-based vertebrates — the name means "ruling reptiles" — and is split into two main groups. One group, Ornithosuchia, evolved into birds and dinosaurs, while the other, Pseudosuchia, gave rise to crocodilians, such as modern crocodiles.

T. bellator belongs to Pseudosuchia. It was about 7.9 feet (2.4 meters) long and weighed 130 pounds (60 kilograms). It had a long neck and thin jaw full of sharp teeth. Very few of these types of Pseudosuchia (called poposauroids) have been found in South America, the researchers noted.

The team found the partial skeleton of T. bellator, including the lower jaw, backbone and pelvis, during an excavation in May in the Dona Francisca municipality in Brazil.

The reptile's back was covered in bony plates called osteoderms, which modern crocodiles also have.

"This animal was an active predator, but despite its relatively large size, it was far from the largest hunter of its time, with the same ecosystem home to giants as big as seven meters [23 feet] long," said Müller, who led the team of palaeontologists that excavated T. bellator. "Despite the diversity of pseudosuchians, they remain poorly understood." Fossils of some of their lineages, such as poposauroids, are "extremely rare" in the fossil record, he said.

T. bellator is closely related to another individual discovered in Tanzania, he said. Mandasuchus tanyauchen, discovered in 1933, lived about 245 million years ago, when Africa and South America were both part of the supercontinent Pangea.

"At that time, the continents were still united, which allowed the free dispersal of organisms across regions that are now separated by oceans," Müller said. "As a result, the faunas of Brazil and Africa shared several common elements, reflecting an intertwined evolutionary and ecological history."

The outsize fake spiders are made of silk; plant debris; and dead, disembodied prey. Some decoys look rudimentary, but others accurately imitate the shape of a spider, according to a study published Nov. 6 in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

The builders of these decoy spiders are the orb weavers Cyclosa inca and Cyclosa longicauda, which measure just 0.1 inch (2.5 millimeters) long. Their spiderwebs are classic wheel shapes made of silk, but inside them lie important clues about spider survival strategies in a world filled with predators.

"They don't just decorate their webs — they meticulously arrange detritus, prey carcasses and silk into a structure that's not only larger than their own body, but clearly resembles the silhouette of a bigger, menacing spider," study lead author George Olah, a conservation geneticist at the Australian National University, said in a statement.

Unlike other orb weavers that build silken tubes to hide inside in their webs, the two Cyclosa spiders invest their time, energy and resources into crafting these decoys. This means the fakes are more than a quirky biological observation, study co-author Lawrence Reeves, an assistant professor at the University of Florida's Medical Entomology Laboratory, said in the statement.

"It illustrates a fundamental evolutionary trade-off in the spider world," Reeves said.

Researchers have known about Cyclosa spiders' strange antics for some time, but the new study is the first time the decoy-building behavior has been formally documented and interpreted.

The spiders turn their webs into "theaters of deception" to stave off would-be attackers, Olah said.

The decoys likely intimidate birds, lizards and other natural predators, prompting them to stay away. They may also provide camouflage for the small Cyclosa spiders, which have the same coloration as their creations and can therefore hide among the plant matter and prey remains.

The decoys may be as effective in defending Cyclosa spiders against predators as the retreats other orb weavers build, explaining why the spiders invest their energy into making them, according to the study. When predators approach the webs, Cyclosa spiders concealed within the decoys shake their abdomen to create vibrations in the fake spiders that make them seem alive.

The spiders do this day and night, the researchers wrote in the study. "When further approached, the spider jumped off from the web to the ground," they noted of a handful of observations in the Peruvian Amazon in 2022, adding that arachnids returned to their webs once the perceived threat was gone.

The decoys may also provide safe places for Cyclosa spiders to lay their eggs, Juan Carlos Yatto, a nature guide in Peru's Tambopata National Reserve who worked with the study's authors, said in a video. The spiders move the contents of their webs to new locations by building a single thread, along which they transport their eggs and all the debris and body parts used for their decoy. In this scenario, the disassembled decoy can camouflage the eggs during relocation, Yatto said.

Other benefits of building decoys could be that they attract prey and strengthen spiderwebs against adverse weather, the researchers wrote in the study. Further research is needed to understand these different advantages, Olah said.

Cyclosa spiders and their strangely decorated webs are featured in the documentary series "The Secret Lives of Animals."

Spider quiz: Test your web of knowledge

All three species are part of the Nectophrynoides genus, also known as "tree toads," which is a group known for birthing live baby toads that skip the tadpole stage. Previously thought to be one species with a large population and habitat range, these smaller, more fragmented species may require additional conservation measures, researchers wrote in a new study.

"Live-bearing is exceptionally rare among frogs and toads, practiced by less than 1% of frogs species, making these new species exceptionally interesting," study co-author H. Christoph Liedtke, a researcher who studies amphibian evolution at the Spanish National Research Council, said in a statement.

Just 17 of over 7,000 known species of frogs and toads were known to give birth to live young prior to this study, with 13 of them being part of the Nectophrynoides genus. The new study, published Nov. 6 in the journal Vertebrate Zoology, adds the three newly identified species to each of those totals.

Researchers first identified a species called Nectophrynoides viviparus in 1905 and classified it within the Nectophrynoides genus in 1926. Since then, scientists have found specimens of N. viviparus across the Eastern Arc Mountains and Southern Highlands of Tanzania. But a 2016 study suggested that many of those toads were genetically distinct enough that they might be from multiple similar-but-distinct species.

In the new study, researchers looked more closely at Nectophrynoides toads from the Eastern Arc Mountains. They studied hundreds of toad specimens preserved in museums, as well as recordings of some of the toads' calls in the wild. Using methods collectively known as museomics, they also sampled mitochondrial DNA from some of the museum specimens.

Together, the research revealed that the toads in that region were in fact from four separate species, three of which had not been identified before. These species — Nectophrynoides saliensis, Nectophrynoides luhomeroensis and Nectophrynoides uhehe — look similar to N. viviparus. However, slight differences in their genetics, their head shapes, and the shape and positioning of the glands on their shoulders distinguish them. Other toads from farther north in the mountains might constitute even more new species, the scientists noted.

"Some of these specimens were collected over 120 years ago," study co-author Alice Petzold, an evolutionary scientist at the University of Potsdam in Germany, said in the statement. "Our museomics work was able to reveal exactly which populations those old specimens belonged to, giving us a lot more confidence for future work on these toads."

Researchers previously thought N. viviparus was widespread across the Eastern Arc Mountains and Southern Highlands and that it wasn't vulnerable or endangered. But the discovery that the four distinct species have much smaller and more fragmented habitats could change their conservation statuses, since each individual species might be more at risk than expected. One related species, Nectophrynoides asperginis, went extinct in the wild in 2009 following the construction of a nearby dam and a fungal disease outbreak.

"The forests where these toads are known to occur are disappearing quickly," study co-author John Lyakurwa, a biologist at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, said in the statement. These habitats are vulnerable to both human uses and climate change.

Future studies could help scientists determine how threatened each species is and inform possible conservation strategies, the researchers wrote in the study.

So does that mean brainless animals can think?

"Brainless does not necessarily mean neuron-less," Simon Sprecher, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, told Live Science in an email. Apart from marine sponges and the blob-like placozoans, all animals have neurons, he said.

Creatures like jellyfish, sea anemones and hydras possess diffuse nerve nets — webs of interconnected neurons distributed throughout the body and tentacles, said Tamar Lotan, head of the Cnidarian Developmental Biology and Molecular Ecology Lab at the University of Haifa in Israel.

"The nerve net can process sensory input and generate organized motor responses (e.g., swimming, contraction, feeding, and stinging), effectively performing information integration without a brain," she told Live Science in an email.

This simple setup can support surprisingly advanced behavior. Sprecher's team showed that the starlet sea anemone (Nematostella vectensis) can form associative memories — learning to link two unrelated stimuli. In the experiment, the researchers trained sea anemones to associate a harmless flash of light with a mild shock. Eventually, the light alone made them retract.

Another experiment showed that sea anemones can learn to recognize genetically identical neighbors after repeated encounters and curb their usual territorial aggression. The fact that anemones change their behavior toward genetically identical neighbors suggests they can distinguish between "self" and "non-self".

A study led by Jan Bielecki, a neurobiologist at Kiel University in Germany, showed that box jellyfish can associate visual cues with the physical sensation of bumping into objects, helping them navigate around obstacles more effectively.

"It is my core belief that learning can be achieved by single neurons," Bielecki told Live Science in an email.

So if animals with nerve nets instead of brains can remember and learn from experience, does that mean they can think?

"This is a tricky question to answer," Sprecher said. The definition of 'thinking' depends on the field. Psychologists, biologists and neuroscientists define 'thinking' differently, Bielecki noted.

Additionally, "thinking is too vague a concept," Bielecki said. Scientists study things like decision-making, pattern recognition, associative learning, memory formation and inductive reasoning. Each has their own, much narrower definition.

Ken Cheng, a professor of animal behavior at Macquarie University in Australia, noted that scientists tend to use the word "cognition" instead of "thinking."

"Scientists shy away from the term 'thinking' because thinking, to most of us, means something running through the head, and we don't have a good way to verify that in another animal or nonanimal species," Cheng told Live Science. Even "cognition" does not have an agreed-upon definition, he said, but "in the broadest sense, cognition is information processing — using information from the world, including the world inside an organism, to do things."

If thinking is that broad sense of cognition, then all life-forms think, Cheng said. This includes animals like marine sponges and placozoans, which process information about their surroundings to keep themselves alive. But when it comes to "advanced cognition," which goes beyond basic learning, however, scientists aren't sure whether brainless animals can think, Cheng said.

Basic cognition can be regarded as any change in behavior that goes beyond reflexes, Sprecher said. By that definition, brainless animals do show cognition. "However, more advanced types of cognitive abilities might require consciousness or self-awareness," he said.

Lotan pointed out that cnidarians (an animal family that includes jellyfish, sea anemones and many other marine invertebrates), which evolved more than 700 million years ago, continue to thrive while many animals with brains have long disappeared.

"This resilience suggests that they possess a unique adaptive system enabling them to endure and flourish through extreme environmental changes over geological timescales — despite lacking a brain," she said. Their neurons allow them to sense and interpret their surroundings, "perhaps representing a rudimentary form of thinking."

Brain quiz: Test your knowledge of the most complex organ in the body

"Kingdom" is billed as "one of the most ambitious wildlife series ever made" and documents four rival animal families in Zambia's South Luangwa National Park over a period of five years.

In a lush corner of the park, known as Nsefu, the filmmakers followed a lion pride, a wild dog pack, a hyena clan and a leopard family, showcasing the groups' behaviors and social dynamics.

Narrated by 99-year-old Sir David Attenborough, who has fronted the BBC's natural history output for decades, "Kingdom" premieres on U.K. screens on Nov. 9. The U.S. release will come in January 2026.

How to watch "Kingdom" in the U.K.

In the U.K., episodes will air live on TV on BBC One and online on BBC iPlayer, where episodes will also be available to watch on-demand once premiered.

"Kingdom" has a primetime Sunday evening slot, with the first episode airing at 6:20 p.m. GMT on Nov. 9, with new episodes coming at the same time on the following five Sundays.

BBC iPlayer is free to use with a registration as long as your TV licence is up to date.

Can I watch "Kingdom" in the U.S.?

Attenborough fans in the U.S. will have to wait until next year to watch "Kingdom," which has a release date of Jan. 24, 2026 on BBC America and AMC+.

Watch "Kingdom" from anywhere

If you're U.K.-based but traveling overseas you can watch Attenborough's "Kingdom" from anywhere, thanks to a VPN.

A VPN, or virtual private network, is a piece of internet security software that can alter your device's digital location, unlocking the geo-restrictions on most streaming platforms.

Our expert colleagues at TechRadar rate NordVPN as the best VPN. Not only is it great for unblocking streaming services, it has top-level security features, a reasonable price tag and, right now, a big discount.

"Kingdom": Trailer

What to expect from "Kingdom": Synopsis

"Kingdom's" five-year scope is "a first in natural history programming," the BBC said in a statement, with a team of 170 people — including more than 90 Zambian crew and wildlife experts — spending around 1,400 days in Nsefu and filming 76 shoots.

"We filmed over five years, which is the longest we have ever continuously filmed in one location, and that in itself is quite an achievement. There are of course risks to putting all your eggs in one basket by focusing solely on one location, but it has absolutely paid off with 'Kingdom,'" executive producer Mike Gunton said in a promotional interview with the BBC.

"Having spent so much time observing these animals and filming them, we're seeing amazing bits of animal behaviour that people have never seen on television before, like wild dogs working together to force hyenas off a kill."

As well as the wild dogs and the hyenas, "Kingdom" follows a pride of lions and a family of leopards, examining how the groups interact as they fight to survive and thrive.

"If I had to pick one word to describe 'Kingdom' it would be 'intensity.' It's almost Shakespearean in its feel, and it's incredibly ambitious in its scale," Gunton said.

"It's a story that speaks across the ages because it focuses on four families in one location all struggling to survive. They've got their internal struggles, but they've also got struggles against the other rival families. And this creates a really intriguing tapestry of rich stories," he added.

"It’s high drama — it's got a bit of 'Game of Thrones,' it's got a bit of 'Succession,' but it's also got a bit of 'The Lion King.' But 'Kingdom' also has this wonderful warmth about it. It can be quite a white-knuckle ride at times, but there are also some wonderful moments of beauty and tenderness," Gunton said.

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The researchers were observing a group of orcas (Orcinus orca) during a whale-watching trip off the coast of Skjervøy in the Arctic Circle when the water around the animals suddenly turned crimson with blood, they said.

"We were floating calmly and watching the feeding, when all of a sudden, close to the boat, there was blood spilling and splashing everywhere," Krisztina Balotay, a photographer and videographer at Orca Channel, a boat tour company that also gathers marine mammal data in Norwegian waters, wrote in a Facebook post on Nov. 2.

"At first, I had no idea what was going on," Balotay wrote in the post. "A moment later, I saw a little head pop above water. As it turned out, a female gave birth right next to us."

Moments after the calf was born, the rest of the group formed a protective circle around it. The orcas, mostly females and juveniles, were unusually energetic and seemed to be forcefully pushing the newborn toward the surface, which worried the team on the boat at first.

"We observed them carrying the calf on their back and holding it above water for air," Balotay wrote. "I was not sure if it was alive."

Scientists with the Norwegian Orca Survey, a research and conservation organization, flew a drone above the orcas to take a closer look. They also asked five other whale-watching boats that were on the scene to clear the area so the animals could calm down, representatives of the survey wrote in a Facebook post on Nov. 3.

Footage from the drone showed that the calf had struggled to stay afloat for the first 15 minutes after birth, but that it was alive and well after that.

"The mother was identified as NKW-591, a known female first identified in 2013," the representatives wrote. "She has had multiple offspring and is therefore an experienced mother."

The calf's dorsal fin was bent, but this is to be expected in the hours after a newborn emerges from the womb, Balotay noted in Orca Channel's post. "It was so amazing to watch something like this in the wild," she added.

This is the first documented case of an orca being born in the wild and of its first hour alive, Norwegian Orca Survey representatives wrote on Facebook. The team followed the orcas until darkness fell, maintaining a distance of more than 1,000 feet (300 meters) so as not to disturb the animals. "We also ensured the whales' space was protected by stopping additional boats from approaching," they said.

The Norwegian Orca Survey hope they will encounter this orca group and the calf again in the coming weeks. In the meantime, researchers will collate the data they collected during and after the birth for a study.

"Documenting calf survival remains one of the core objectives of our long-term research," they said.