Animal Life news stories

New research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that our ancestors were not just lucky scavengers. They were also effective foragers who repeatedly processed, accessed, and shared animal resources across different environments.

Mayflies are among the world’s oldest winged insects, emerging roughly 300m years ago – long before dinosaurs walked the Earth. Even the Mesopotamian poem the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest pieces of literature, makes reference to the short-lived mayfly. Over the epochs, the insect’s basic design has changed very little compared with the fossils of their ancestors.

There’s been a lot of buzz in recent years about bee cognition, but not all scientists are convinced. Now, new research has added a fresh ingredient to the mix: Accounting for how bees actually see the world, rather than relying on human assumptions…And guess what? The bees still seem to be able to count.The research has been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

In our research, published today in Current Biology, we show that when some animals spot a predator, they issue a warning cry that is picked up by others and spread through the rainforest canopy. For a time, different species are linked into a shared information network, and parts of the forest briefly fall silent.

The staccato clicks of sperm whales may sound like meaningless background noise to human ears, but a new analysis suggests they may be part of a communication system with a level of complexity approaching that of our own. The research has been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

The identity of a mysterious artifact found in Devon almost 160 years ago has finally been revealed. New research has identified it as a pendant made from the tooth of a gray seal, which would have been worn by an ancient human more than 15,000 years ago. The findings of the study are published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.

For decades, archaeologists have debated when the hominin ancestors of humans first started eating megafauna—animals weighing more than 1,000kg. In a new study published in eLife, our team of archaeologists studying the evolution of the earliest humans in Africa has identified one of the earliest cases of elephant butchery.

The ancestor of apes was long thought to come from East Africa, but newly discovered fossils in Egypt may prompt a rethink. The discovery of an enigmatic ape’s 18-million-year-old fossils in Egypt hints that the ancestors of all living apes, a group that includes humans, may have originated in northeast Africa or Arabia, a new study finds. The study was published March 26 in the journal Science.

The discovery of the oldest ever dog DNA suggests they have been our best friends for nearly 16,000 years – 5,000 years earlier than had previously been thought, new research said Wednesday… Two new studies published in the journal Nature sequenced the genomes from archaeological remains, shedding light on the elusive origins of our furry friends.

A landmass that once connected Britain to mainland Europe had temperate forests that could have sustained Stone Age people for millennia before the landmass was flooded, a new study suggests. The results were published on March 10 in the journal PNAS.

The partnership between ravens and wolves goes back to Norse mythology – Odin’s birds scouted ahead and led prey to the god’s canines, a relationship that provided food for all. The myth has some roots in reality: when wolves have a successful hunt, ravens are often observed first on the scene – and new research published Thursday in the journal Science put the legend to the test.

In his new book, “The Call of the Honeyguide: What Science Tells Us About How to Live Well With the Rest of Life” (Hachette Book Group, 2025), Rob Dunn, a professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University, explores these complex interdependencies found across the natural world, including the numerous mutualisms humans engage in, such as our relationships with dogs and with the microbes in our guts.

Why did the Lord of Chincha occupy such a high position in Inca society? In our new study published in PLOS One, we find evidence for a surprising potential source of power and influence: bird poop.

The last common ancestor of all living things did not just suddenly appear on Earth roughly 4.2 billion years ago. Some of its genes came from an even older and more mysterious source…The study was published in Cell Genomics.

Scientists have been forced to rethink the intelligence of cattle after an Austrian cow named Veronika displayed an impressive – and until now undocumented – knack for tool use…“I was naturally amazed by her extraordinary intelligence and thought how much we could learn from animals: patience, calmness, contentment, and gentleness.”

The hunting of large whales goes back much further in time than previously thought. New research…reveals that Indigenous communities in southern Brazil were hunting large cetaceans 5,000 years ago, around a thousand years before the earliest documented evidence from Arctic and North Pacific societies. The research was published in Nature Communications.