Animal Life news stories

Scientists have found the oldest known ancestor of octopuses – an approximately 330m-year-old fossil unearthed in Montana. The researchers concluded the ancient creature lived millions of years earlier than previously believed, meaning that octopuses originated before the era of dinosaurs.

Scientists discovered traces of carbon—the element on which life on Earth is based—that appear to have come from the Cambrian Explosion.

There is a scientific reason that humans feel better walking through the woods than strolling down a city street, according to a new publication from UO physicist Richard Taylor and an interdisciplinary team of collaborators.

Having never evolved wings, many species of spider instead evolved an uncanny ability to take to the skies using nothing more than a few short threads of gossamer dangling from their dainty butts.

A study suggests the world’s largest rainforest is losing its ability to bounce back from damage caused by droughts, fires and deforestation.

People have been trying to understand how predators and prey are able to stay balanced within our planet’s ecosystems for at least 2,400 years. The Greek author Herodotus even raised the question in his historical treatise Histories, written around 430 BC.

With its immense size, dagger-like teeth and sharp claws, Tyrannosaurus rex was a fearsome predator that once terrorised North America. Now researchers studying its fossils have suggested the beast may not have been the only tyrannosaurus species

It might be best known today for its otters and puffins but 170m years ago the Isle of Skye was home to an enormous flying reptile with a wingspan bigger than a kingsize bed, researchers have revealed.

Photosynthesis quite literally changed our world. Plants ‘eating’ sunlight and ‘breathing out’ oxygen transformed Earth’s entire atmosphere into the one we now breathe, and fuel our ecosystems with energy.

The deep-ocean floor is teeming with undiscovered life-forms that help to regulate Earth’s climate, a new study finds.

The remains of a woolly mammoth have been found among a host of hugely significant Ice Age animal remains in a cave in Devon, experts have said.

For decades, scientists thought that being more carnivorous set our ancestors along their evolutionary path. New evidence casts doubt on this theory.

Image from Venison Steaks (Wiki Commons)

For about 2,000 years most humans have imagined themselves to be the Earth’s “apex predators” – smarter, faster and more deadly than any other creature with which we share the planet.

In 2010, small cores of permafrost sediments were collected by a team at the University of Alberta from gold mines in the Klondike region of central Yukon.

The question of how life first sparked into existence on our planet is one we haven’t yet fully answered, but science is getting closer all the time – and a new study identifies the structures of the proteins that may well have made it happen