Animal Life news stories

The fossilized backbones of what appeared to be woolly mammoths have turned out to come from an entirely different and unexpected animal. The research was published in the Journal of Quaternary Science.

The unique dog burial was identified during construction work for a high-speed railway in the hamlet of Gerstaberg, about 22 miles (35 kilometers) southwest of Stockholm. Experts with the Swedish group Arkeologerna (The Archaeologists) announced the find in a statement and blog post Monday (Dec. 15).

Dogs have been part of human societies across Eurasia for at least 20,000 years, accompanying us through many social and cultural upheavals. The new study by an international team was published in the journal Science.

As British Columbia faces increasingly severe wildfire seasons, new research at UBC is revealing the hidden helpers at work underneath the ash.

Scientists are using DNA from sediments to learn more about Earth’s past, including new revelations about the woolly mammoth.

An astoundingly detailed weevil on a single grain of rice takes first place in 2025’s Nikon Small World photomicrography competition.

The authors add, “Our study shows how, 400,000 years ago in the area of Rome, human groups were able to exploit an extraordinary resource like the elephant—not only for food, but also by transforming its bones into tools. The study was published on October 8, 2025, in the open-access journal PLOS One. 

Published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the new research proposes a transformative approach to economics—one that recognizes nature not merely as a resource, but as a living system deeply intertwined with human identity, culture, and well-being.

Silverpit crater off Yorkshire coast was caused by cathedral-sized asteroid that set off 100-metre tsunami 43m years ago. The findings are published in Nature Communications.

The study, published in Nature Sustainability, describes a powerful new mechanism for increasing the extent of effective area-based protection by piggybacking on community management of natural resources. The paper is titled “Community-based management expands ecosystem protection footprint in Amazonian forests.”

From butterflies to grasshoppers, many delicate little things that run our world are in dire trouble. Not just in regions where human activity directly affects the landscape, but even in remote, human-free zones, a new study finds. The remote insect study was published in Ecology.

Columbian mammoths in Mexico are genetically different from those in the U.S. and Canada, surprise DNA study reveals. The research was published Aug. 28 in the journal Science.

Knowledge about the first settlements of Homo sapiens in the interior of the Iberian Peninsula at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic has been significantly advanced with a new study led by Edgar Téllez, a researcher at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH). The findings are published in the journal Quaternary Science Advances.

Isotopes shows animal began life in Wales, adding weight to theory cattle used in hauling stones across country

A recent study by Dr. Esther Jacobson-Tepfer, published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, explores the transformation of elk rock art in the Mongolian Altai. Her research sheds light on the possible factors that influenced these changes, leading to realistic elk images devolving into warped wolf-like beasts.

A new, advanced technique for studying fossils has revealed that squids evolved more than 50 million years earlier than previously thought and dominated Earth’s ancient seas. The new study was published in the journal Science.