Researchers studied 70 dogs over two years and recorded 1,893 defecations,...
For two years, a few dozen dog owners in the Czech Republic and Germany walked their pets armed with the usual plastic bags and one unusual extra: a compass. Whenever a dog stopped to relieve itself...
View ArticleThe golden jackal was a Balkan animal in the 1980s and is now breeding as far...
In August 2022, a camera trap on a plateau between the Black Forest and the Swabian Alb, in southwestern Germany, took a series of five pictures of four golden jackal cubs resting together in front of...
View ArticleThree adult male lions at an Australian safari park given about 200 kilograms...
Adult male lions given about 200 kilograms of whole carcasses every nine days at Monarto Safari Park in South Australia spent almost three times as long feeding on carcass days as they had on their...
View ArticleA camera set on a tripod in an Australian bay for 21 hours filmed octopuses...
Seventeen metres down in Jervis Bay, the neighbours throw mud. Shells and the odd clump of seaweed go flying too. In 21 hours of footage from GoPro cameras left on tripods in January 2015, roughly ten...
View ArticleGuam fights its invasive brown tree snakes by dropping dead mice laced with...
Four times a second, a helicopter flying over Guam spits out a dead mouse. Each one is a newborn, already deceased, with an 80-milligram tablet of paracetamol tucked inside (Americans know the drug as...
View ArticleSeven tiger sharks carrying cameras surveyed 20.6 kilometres of Bahamian...
The most productive survey crew to work the Bahamas in years had no clipboards, no salaries and a mouthful of serrated teeth each. Between 2016 and 2020, researchers fitted camera packages to seven...
View ArticleLouisiana imported nutria from fur farms in the 1930s and later promoted the...
A twenty-pound rodent with bright orange teeth has its own nickname in Louisiana, a handful of recipes in a 1963 LSU cookbook, and at least one nonfiction book named after it, Swamp Rat. I stumbled...
View ArticleThe scimitar-horned oryx was declared extinct in the wild in 2000 while zoos...
For about a quarter of a century, the scimitar-horned oryx existed everywhere except the one place it belonged. A striking desert antelope — pale, with long curved horns that arc back like the sabres...
View ArticleResearchers implanted sleep trackers in the trunks of two wild elephants in...
Picture three tonnes of elephant standing dead still in teak woodland at three in the morning, trunk hanging limp, eyes shut. That is what elephant sleep looks like, and it is over faster than a...
View ArticleGPS trackers followed 925 pet cats across six countries and found they roamed...
Strap a GPS unit to a house cat and you expect a road movie. What you get is a sitcom, filmed on one street, with the same four gardens as the set. That is roughly what happened when researchers talked...
View ArticleResearchers vacuumed dust from 50 houses and counted 5,340 mites under a...
Fifty households in the Polish countryside let researchers vacuum their homes, and the tally came back at 5,340 bodies. None of them from the bins or behind the fridge. They came out of beds,...
View ArticleIn September 2026, the Chatham Island black robin — down to five birds and...
Count them: five. That was the entire global population of the Chatham Island black robin in 1980 — five birds, among them a single breeding pair, the female known as Old Blue and the male known as Old...
View ArticleThousands of octopuses nest 10,500 feet below California’s coast, where warm...
About 130 kilometers southwest of Monterey, California, a low ridge on the flank of an extinct underwater volcano called Davidson Seamount holds one of the densest gatherings of octopuses ever...
View ArticleA 5,700-year-old lump of chewed birch tar dug up on a Danish island gave up...
A dark, pliable lump about the size of a thumbnail came out of the mud at Syltholm, on the southern Danish island of Lolland, during excavations run by Museum Lolland-Falster ahead of construction on...
View ArticleChemical bonds locked inside fossil teeth put T. rex’s body temperature at...
Three fossil teeth from two Tyrannosaurus rex individuals have yielded an estimated average body temperature of 36.3 degrees Celsius. The uncertainty is plus or minus 2.5 degrees at one standard error,...
View ArticleIn July 2025, three African wild dog brothers left their pack in Zambia’s...
Three male African wild dogs left the Mayukuyuku pack in Zambia’s Kafue National Park in July 2025 and did not stop moving for roughly eight months. By the time GPS collars showed them settling into a...
View ArticleFifty reindeer genomes from six Norwegian herds show a feral population...
A herd of reindeer released from Sami reindeer husbandry in central Norway about fifty years ago has been taking up DNA from the wild herds around it, and the borrowed DNA sits most heavily in the...
View ArticleTwo Tasmanian devil specimens came out of Juukan 2, the Pilbara rock shelter...
Tasmanian devil remains have come out of more than 120 Quaternary deposits across Australia. Until now, not one of them was in the Pilbara. Two specimens from the Juukan 2 rock shelter on Puutu Kunti...
View ArticleEven on a clear day, Earth’s atmosphere holds a vertical electric field of...
The air above a quiet field is electrically different from the ground beneath it. In fair weather, the electric potential typically rises by about 120 volts for every meter of height near a flat...
View ArticleA ranch dog in Wyoming brought home a dead animal in 1981, two years after...
Shep started barking outside the bedroom window at three in the morning, and John and Lucille Hogg rolled over and went back to sleep. Porcupine, probably. Next day John found a carcass near the house:...
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