Animal Life news stories

Thousands of miles away from its origin, magic happens: around 27 million tons of dust from the deserts of Africa drops out of the sky, bringing life into the ‘lungs of the planet’.

Image from: Catedral Verde – Floresta Amazonica (Wiki Commons)

Vast networks of microscopic, underground fungi serve a crucial role in Earth’s ecosystems — and there’s a lot we don’t know about them.

If we want to tackle the climate crisis, we need to address a global blindspot: the vast underground fungal networks that sequester carbon and sustain much of life on Earth.

A dinosaur-age fossil heralded as the first four-legged snake known to science might actually be an entirely different beastie, a new study claims.

Physically speaking, our Universe seems uncannily perfect. It stands to reason that if it wasn’t, life as we know it – and planets, atoms, everything else really – wouldn’t exist.

Ancient Indigenous fishing practices can be used to inform sustainable management and conservation today, according to a new study from Simon Fraser University.

The connection between human and dog runs deep. Early signs of domestication date back to 33,000 years ago… The pairing makes for a striking case in coevolution — no other species has been so thoroughly integrated into human society. Dogs are our sentinels and shepherds, hunting partners and cancer detectors. And more importantly, to those of us who have had dogs in our lives, they are our dearest friends.

Stick a turtle’s beak on a baby hippo. Then twist its front legs so they stick out to either side, but keep its back legs straight. And give it tusks. Presto, you have something that looks a little bit like a prototype mammal-like animal that walked the planet hundreds of millions of years ago.

Mammoths and other giant creatures of the Ice Age such as woolly rhinos survived longer than scientists thought, coexisting with humans for tens of thousands of years before they vanished for good. That’s according to the results of an ambitious 10-year research project that analyzed DNA from hundreds of soil samples across the Arctic.

Traces of ancient life were locked inside a 2.5 billion-year-old ruby from Greenland, according to a new study.

A Jurassic graveyard in Patagonia, Argentina, holds more than 100 fossilized eggs and the bones of 80 Mussaurus patagonicus dinosaurs ranging in age from hatchling to adult. The trove of dinosaur remains suggests that these paleo-beasts lived in herds as early as 192 million years ago, a new study finds.

Some of the oldest evidence for modern humans living in rainforests has been found in a cave in Southeast Asia. Researchers analysed fossilised teeth discovered in Laos, revealing that these humans ate fruits and meat as part of an omnivorous diet.

We know that true polar wander (TPW) can occasionally tilt whole planets and moons relative to their axes, but it’s not entirely clear just how often this has happened to Earth. Now a new study presents evidence of one such tilting event that occurred around 84 million years ago – when dinosaurs still walked the Earth.

Nearly half of our DNA has been written off as junk, the discards of evolution…

The close of the Eocene roughly 33 million years ago marks a time of great change on Earth. In a slow reversal of what we’re seeing today, temperatures dropped and glaciers stretched their icy fingers towards the equator.

With powerful legs tipped by dagger-like talons, capable of eviscerating you with a single kick, cassowaries are the bird that most lives up to the moniker of a modern dinosaur.