Animal Life news stories

Evidence from 252m years ago shows surviving animals bounced back stronger, fitter, faster and smarter.

Do animals dream? And what would proof of their dreams tell us about their consciousness? In a new episode of the University of Chicago’s “Big Brains” podcast, Peña-Guzmán talks about the science of animal consciousness.

More than 11,000 years ago, young children trekking with their families through what is now White Sands National Park in New Mexico discovered the stuff of childhood dreams: muddy puddles made from the footprints of a giant ground sloth.

As the first dinosaurs were finding their feet around 230 million years ago, the ancestors of modern mammals were also emerging. Somewhere along the way they developed a remarkable ability: to generate their own warmth.

Researchers wanted to know how animals learn to walk and learn from their stumbling, so they built a four-legged, dog-sized robot to simulate it, according to a new study reported in Nature Machine Intelligence.

Scientists have taken an important first step into studying the effects of the psychedelic drug psilocybin — the active substance in “magic” mushrooms — at a cellular and genetic level. Their findings, published in Scientific Reports, indicate that a single dose of psilocybin produces a long-lasting antidepressant-like effect in flies.

We all know these busy insects are good for crops and biodiversity, but proof is emerging that they are also clever, sentient and unique beings

The death of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to become ascendant. But the history of mammals stretches far deeper than that. The first mammals go back about 325 million years, when the ancestral mammal lineage split from the reptile line.

Over 50,000 years ago, giant carnivorous storks would have competed with ancient hominins for food on a tropical island.

Predatory dinosaurs with big skulls tend to have tiny arms. Researchers propose there might be a direct link between those traits.

Neanderthals and Denisovans in our genes, sentient mollusks, and speaking cats and bats. We are not what we thought we were. Nor were other human species, we have been discovering over the last 20 years.

The Cosquer cave near Marseille astonished the diver who discovered it with its ancient depictions of sea and land animals. Now it has been painstakingly recreated in the French port for all to enjoy

Formation of solid iron core 550m years ago restored magnetic field and protected surface.

Fossil hunters have traced the rise of the dinosaurs back to the freezing winters the beasts endured while roaming around the far north

The extinct animal is not as closely related to Australian roos as once thought.