Animal Life news stories

Our glorious little blue marble of a planet is filled with an astonishingly diverse array of lifeforms, but some are definitely more peculiar than others.

At the end of October, a Mississippi resident made a rare discovery along the drought-stricken Mississippi River – a fossilized jawbone from an American lion that roamed the area roughly 11,000 years ago, according to McClatchy News

According to a recent study, the amazing survival techniques of polar marine creatures may help to explain how the earliest animals on Earth may have evolved earlier than the oldest fossils suggest

The complete skeletal remains of a spider monkey — seen as an exotic curiosity in pre-Hispanic Mexico — grants researchers new evidence regarding social-political ties between two ancient powerhouses: Teotihuacán and Maya Indigenous rulers.

Tardigrades are tiny, incredibly tough animals that can withstand a wide range of dangers, including many that would obliterate most other creatures known to science.

A global drop in oxygen levels about 550 million years ago led to Earth’s first known mass extinction, new evidence suggests.

Researchers have observed a wild chimpanzee showing an object to its mother simply for sharing’s sake—social behavior previously thought to be unique to humans.

Tracking down the oldest traces of life on Earth isn’t easy. Smoosh a bunch of microbes between layers of rock and let them ripen for billions of years; what you end up with is going to resemble rock more than an ancient life form.

Study finds rats instinctively move in time to music – an ability previously thought to be uniquely human.

Before life on Earth exploded in diversity some 540 million years ago, the first primitive animal skeletons were already starting to form.

A team of researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics has tested the rhythmic abilities of harbor seals, a species of animals known to be capable of rhythmic learning. The analyses revealed that seals also have a sense of rhythm, being able to discriminate between rhythmic and non-rhythmic sequences early in life without any training or rewards.

There are few animals as frightening and as fascinating as the snake. So why exactly have we obsessed over them for 70,000 years?

A snail preserved in amber with an intact fringe of tiny delicate bristles along its shell is helping biologists better understand why one of the world’s slimiest animals might evolve such a groovin’ hairstyle.

Researchers measured the electrical fields near swarming honeybees and discovered that insects can produce as much atmospheric electric charge as a thunderstorm cloud.

It is no surprise that a 14km-wide asteroid slamming into the Gulf of Mexico would generate one hell of a tsunami, but this is the first time anyone has worked out how big and how far-reaching it would have been.

The idea is simple but ambitious: protect the ocean by giving it the same kind of rights a person might have. No such legal mechanism is currently in place, but support for this concept is growing as experts increasingly recognize that the ocean is in dire need of defense.