Animal Life news stories

Tiny tardigrades can survive conditions that would kill most other forms of life. By expelling their body’s water and transforming into a seemingly lifeless ball called a tun, they enter a state of dried-up suspended animation in which they can survive for decades without food and water and withstand extreme temperatures, pressures and even the vacuum of space.

An ancient fossil from one of our planet’s earliest vertebrate organisms was found concealing an exciting surprise.

The devastating destruction that’s happening across the Amazon might be what comes to your mind first when thinking about deforestation – but it’s by no means the only place where dwindling forests are a worry, as a new study highlights.

Despite transforming history as beasts of burden essential for transporting goods and people, the humble donkey has long been woefully understudied.

The oldest definitive dinosaur species ever discovered in Africa — and one of the oldest dino species to walk Earth — has been unearthed in Zimbabwe, a new study finds.

An international team of researchers with a central contribution from researchers at the Dept. of Biological Physics at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) has unravelled the evolutionary origins of animals and fungi.

Imag from: Geograph Britain and Ireland (Wiki Commons)

Palaeontologists at Adelaide’s Flinders University have used cutting edge micro-CT scanning and 3D printing technology to look inside a 100-million-year-old dinosaur fossil. But this was no ordinary fossil.

Only three people surveyed from coastal communities in China reported seeing the dugong in the past five years.

Researchers looked at the impact of climate on 17-million-year-old tooth fossils.

A new discovery about jumping spiders could challenge some pretty hefty human assumptions about the cognitive abilities of arthropods.

Birds’ brains are a bit of a mystery. Despite the small size of their noggins, parrots and corvids show remarkable intelligence, solving some puzzles as well as primates.

A California-based organisation wants to harness the power of machine learning to decode communication across the entire animal kingdom. But the project has its doubters

About 37,000 years ago, a mother mammoth and her calf met their end at the hands of human beings.

The study, conducted by research groups based in France and Chile, is the first to document a seaweed species that depends on small marine crustaceans bespeckled in pollen-like spores to reproduce.

A farm in England was the unlikely source of a Jurassic jackpot: a treasure trove of 183 million-year-old fossils.

The dawn of dairy farming in Europe occurred thousands of years before most people evolved the ability to drink milk as adults without becoming ill. Now researchers think they know why…