Animal Life news stories

An international team of archaeologists has found what may be the earliest known saddle at a dig site in China. In their paper published in the journal Archaeological Research in Asia, the group describes where the ancient saddle was found, its condition and how it was made.

We at Science News heard the PSA loud and clear: Just leave this toad alone. But we couldn’t help but wonder: What other amazing animals may have psychedelic potential? Join us on a tour, by land and sea, of some of the world’s mind-altering fauna.

Rhino-like horse relatives that had lived in the shadow of the dinosaurs became gigantic “thunder beasts” as suddenly as an evolutionary lightning strike,  new research published Thursday (May 11) in the journal Science shows.

A geological study of the rock formation that encased a fossilized example of the world’s biggest “raptor” shows it’s 10 million years older than previously understood.

A large number of extraordinary new fossils, including many soft-bodied creatures, have been discovered near Llandrindod Wells in Powys.

It is not just humans that get the munchies: worms also display the same craving for their favourite snacks after consuming cannabis, new research has found.

What are the most successful organisms on the planet? Some people might think of apex predators like lions and great white sharks. For others, insects or bacteria might come to mind. But few would mention a family of plants that we see around us every day: grasses.

As wooly mammoths grazed frigid Siberian steppes for more than half a million years, they evolved increasingly fluffy fur, large fat deposits, and smaller ears, according to a new study.

In the depths of a network of underwater caves, Julien Louys has been on the trail of some rather unusual animals. Despite the sunken setting, these creatures weren’t forms of marine life — they were giant marsupials, and they became extinct tens of thousands of years ago.

New research into ancient populations that resided on the Tibetan Plateau has found that dairy pastoralism was being practiced far earlier than previously thought and may have been key to long-term settlement of the region’s extreme environment.

The bat skeletons unearthed in southwest Wyoming are the oldest ever found, and their discovery has sparked a reshuffle in the bat family tree. See the research here.

The eye is so complex that even Charles Darwin was at a loss to explain how it could have arisen. Now, it turns out that the evolution of the vertebrate eye got an unexpected boost—from bacteria, which contributed a key gene involved in the retina’s response to light.

Until now, the oldest evidence of Homo sapiens eating land snails dated to roughly 49,000 years ago in Africa and 36,000 years ago in Europe. But tens of thousands of years earlier, people at a southern African rock shelter roasted these slimy, chewy — and nutritious — creepers that can grow as big as an adult’s hand, researchers report in the April 15 Quaternary Science Reviews.

Native American people integrated horses into their communities much earlier than European colonial records suggest, according to an innovative study that combined archaeological and genetic analysis with Indigenous oral traditions.

Bones found on the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen suggest the ancient marine reptiles known as ichthyosaurs roamed Earth’s oceans for much longer than we thought.

It’s easy to see why most folks think of mushrooms as some type of weird plant, popping out from under the soil when it rains and found in the vegetable aisle of the grocery store…