Animal Life news stories

The inadvertent discovery of sea life on a boulder beneath an Antarctic ice shelf challenges our understanding of how organisms can live in environments far from sunlight, according to a team of biologists.

Birdwatchers get very excited when a ‘rare’ migratory bird makes landfall having been blown off-course and flown beyond its normal range. But these are rare for a reason; most birds that have made the journey before they are able to correct for large displacements and find their final destination.

Researchers say the Australian lungfish, native to the Burnett and Mary Rivers, is the closest living fish relative to humans and other land dwellers.

They’ve long been thought of as smarter than your average animal, but now researchers claim they have taught pigs to use a joystick, suggesting they are even cleverer than previously thought.

Large parts of the Sahara Desert were green thousands of years ago, evidenced by prehistoric engravings in the desert of giraffes, crocodiles and a stone-age cave painting of humans swimming.

Sometime toward the end of the last ice age, a group of humans armed with stone-tipped spears stalked their prey in the bitter cold of northeastern Siberia, tracking bison and woolly mammoths across a vast, grassy landscape.

Simon Fraser University researchers have found evidence that large ambush-predatory worms–some as long as two metres–roamed the ocean floor near Taiwan over 20 million years ago.

The fluttering flight patterns of butterflies have long inspired poets but baffled scientists.

Franz Mesmer might have been on to something when he described animal magnetism as an invisible force possessed by all living things – at least, that seems to be the case with these snakes.

A study of extinct dire wolf DNA reveals surprises, including that the carnivores, made famous as fictional pets in Game of Thrones, weren’t closely related to wolves.

Image from: Flickr: Dire Wolf Skeleton (Wiki Commons)

More than 45,500 years ago, perched on a ledge at the back of an Indonesian cave, an artist was at work.

Remarkably well-preserved fossils are helping scientists unravel a mystery about the origins of early animals that puzzled Charles Darwin.

Hippies and other early psychonauts weren’t the only ones dropping acid back in the Sixties and Seventies. Several animals also had the experience of dabbling with LSD, courtesy of the scientists who wanted to see what effects it would have on various species. The results of those tests ranged from bizarre to tragic.