Animal Life news stories

Charles Darwin enjoys a near god-like status among scientists for his theory of evolution. But his ideas that animals are conscious in the same way humans are have long been shunned. Until now.

A joint study…yields the first direct proof of the consumption and processing of dairy products in the Pyrenees already at the start of the Neolithic period, approximately 7,500 years ago, as well as the consumption of pig. The results lead to doubts about the belief that these products were first used much later in the Pyrenean mountain range.

The universal equation has been shown to accurately predict the flapping frequency of birds, insects and even long-extinct prehistoric creatures like the flying reptiles, pterosaurs. It even translates to the flapping flippers of swimming creatures like whales and penguins. The study is published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

In the East Siberian Arctic (>70 °N), there is not only evidence of significant woolly mammoth populations, but also how humans interacted with them, the focus of new research in Quaternary Science Reviews.

Elephants call out to each other using individual names that they invent for their fellow pachyderms, a study said on Monday.

Earth’s largest remaining tract of tropical rainforest is kept alive by a complex water cycle that we’re only just beginning to understand. Yet our activities are changing it before we can see the full picture, a new report finds.

New research led by geologists at Western Australia’s Curtin University provides evidence that fresh water emerged on Earth about 4 billion years ago – half a billion years earlier than previously thought. The study is published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Archaeologists have fully mapped a series of ancient rock art in Venezuela and Colombia, including the world’s largest monumental engraving, using photography and drone footage. The study was published on Tuesday (June 4) in the journal Antiquity.

New research published in the journal Science Advances might explain the Earth-shaking processes that led to the end-Cambrian mass extinction.

Despite decades of study, this Ice Age mystery remains unsolved. Researchers simply don’t have sufficient evidence at this point to rule out one scenario or the other—or indeed other explanations that have been proposed (e.g. disease, an impact event from a comet, or a combination of factors)… A new work published in Frontiers in Mammal Science set out to address this information deficit.

A new study of stick insects suggests that evolution may sometimes repeat itself in a predictable manner, which could help our understanding of how organisms may change in response to selection pressures. The study has been published in Science Advances.

At some point hundreds of millions of years ago, dinosaur scales evolved into feathers. New research published in Nature Communications might help explain how and when that transition occurred.

The first dinosaurs to have a warm-blooded metabolism might have emerged 180 million years ago during the early Jurassic period, according to a new study. New research published in the journal Current Biology might have answered that question.

A recent analysis of a sperm whale’s vocalizations suggests variations in ‘clicks’ represent a kind of alphabet that forms the basis of a complex communication system. This research was published in Nature Communications.

Researchers have observed a male orangutan treat a wound on his face with a plant that’s also used in human medicine. It’s the first time any wild animal has been seen caring for a wound using a natural substance with known medicinal properties, researchers report May 2 in Scientific Reports.

In the darkest corners of the planet, where the light of the Sun never touches, eerie glows can yet be found, illuminating the shadows. This is bioluminescence, a remarkable ability that has evolved separately at least 94 times throughout the history of life on Earth. See the study here.