Over 100 captured whales are being held in small, crowded enclosures in a so-called ‘whale jail’ off the coast of Russia, where they await suspected sale to Chinese theme parks, according to local media reports. The discovery of the marine containment facility near the city of Nakhodka in Russia’s south-east is being investigated by Russian

The evolutionary arms race between predator and prey has given rise to many impressive defence mechanisms; as it turns out, the lowly moth is no exception. These unassuming creatures may not have the charming appearance of their butterfly cousins, but their furry facade conceals some tricks that would impress the most advanced military division. Over

An unusual warbler in Pennsylvania has been discovered harbouring an incredible genetic secret. He’s the hybrid of not two, but three different species of bird. His mother was a hybrid of two warblers – and his father was a warbler of an entirely different third genus. “It’s extremely rare,” said ornithologist David Toews of Cornell

There’s no easy way to rate dog intelligence. It can be focused on more than one thing. As canine psychologist Stanley Coren wrote back in the ’90s, there’s adaptive intelligence (i.e., figuring stuff out), working intelligence (i.e. following orders), and instinctive intelligence (i.e. innate talent) – not to mention spatial intelligence, kinesthetic intelligence, interpersonal intelligence,

At first glance, you might miss it. But among Central Park’s usual waterfowl crowd, there appears to be a new addition. And people are flocking to see him. A single, male Mandarin duck flaunts his multi-coloured feathers as he swims out among a posse of mallards and wood ducks. He’s not a local, and it’s

The best scientists are the ones that ask lots of questions, even when they may seem absurd to the rest of us – like, how many mosquitoes can you squeeze into just one cubic centimetre? The answer may seem like a meaningless pursuit, but there’s actually a point – it could help us in our

We all know that corvids (ravens and crows) are no bird brains. Earlier this year, they stunned scientists with their ability to tear paper into a tool to obtain food. Now another bird has followed suit: Goffin’s cockatoos (Cacatua goffiniana) have shown that they can tear cardboard into the shape of a tool to get

It’s a mystery that scientists have been trying to solve for nearly a century. How did the world’s smallest flightless bird end up on a remote island in the middle of the South Atlantic? The Inaccessible Island rail (Atlantisia rogersi) is a tiny, flightless bird – 15 to 17 centimetres long – that is only

With an underwater jet pack, a black wet suit and a tiny briefcase laden with wires, Rui Matsumoto looked like a spy on a sabotage mission. In truth, the scientist was on a different sort of assignment in the Galápagos Islands, though the stakes were equally high. Matsumoto had come to perform sonograms on the

The natural world is a strange and wonderful place. But sometimes biologists come across something that is just… odd. Really, really odd. Case in point: this peculiar arachnid photographed by natural scientist Andreas Kay in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest in July 2017. By all appearances, it looks like it has the tiny head of a black

A mud puddle doesn’t really sound all that threatening, but there’s one in California’s Imperial County that’s so troublesome, an emergency had to be declared earlier this year. It’s called the Niland Geyser and it’s exactly that, a geyser of bubbling mud. But there’s a strange twist – this menacing puddle has been slowly creeping across

Giant pandas are by nature solitary animals, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t well-versed in the language of love. Far from it. When spring arrives and these giant creatures get frisky, effective communication is one of biggest turn-ons. And these pandas know exactly how to express their interest. By recording giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) before,

Almost on the cusp of the Mariana Trench, before it plunges down into the very bowels of the ocean, scientists have found something rare and wonderful. Sometime in 2015, an underwater volcano experienced a massive eruption, spewing molten magma into the surrounding ocean. As the incredibly hot magma meets the water, it begins to rapidly

From deep in the guts of the Earth, a rare treasure has emerged: one of the largest single emeralds ever found. Hailing from the Kagem emerald mine in Zambia, it’s been named Inkalamu, a Chibemba word that means “Lion Emerald”. The beautiful stone weighs a whopping 5,655 carats (1,131 grams, or 39.9 ounces). According to

When Octavius the octopus arrived at the University of Georgia’s Marine Education Center and Aquarium in August, they were holding onto a secret. Well, ten thousand secrets, to be precise. Despite the name, it now turns out that Octavius is female. But the real surprise was that she also happened to be pregnant; the keepers

In the waters off the coast of California, marine scientists are finding a whole world of cephalopod wonders: in the latest instalment, it’s a vast number of octopuses huddling over their eggs in the crevices of an extinct underwater volcano. With an estimated over 1,000 ockies spotted, the area at the Davidson Seamount has now

Deep in the waters of the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of California, marine scientists have been lucky enough to capture a rare and wonderful sight: a sweet Dumbo octopus going about its business. They’re absolutely adorable, but unfortunately we don’t tend to spot Dumbo octopuses (Grimpoteuthis) often; they live deep below the surface of

Sphen wanted to show Magic how much he meant to him. The male gentoo penguin grasped a wet, heart-shaped stone in his beak, waddled to Magic’s nest and plopped it down to buttress their nest. It is a sign of courtship, experts have said, but also practicality. Magic needed to stay huddled over their egg, using rocks to

Forests are often dubbed the lung’s of the Earth. But as beautiful as that metaphor is, trees don’t actually breathe in the common sense of the word – or do they? A creepy new video has captured a dense forest in Quebec rising and falling as if a giant monster were snoring under its mossy

Humans have got a lot to answer for when it comes to interfering with nature. And we can add noisy cargo ships to the rather shameful list of ways we’re affecting the lives of the animals we share the planet with. A new study reveals low-frequency hums from this maritime traffic are causing whales to

During my time as a zookeeper I had the privilege of working with both Sumatran and Amur tigers. If they did not both have stripes, you would think they were different species altogether. The Sumatran tiger is the smallest alive today. At around 100 kilograms (220 pounds), it’s “only” about the weight of a large adult

The US Geological Survey (USGS) has recently updated their assessment of potentially threatening volcanoes across the nation, making changes in light of more than a decade of fresh research. First, the good news: all of that data has revealed a handful of volcanoes with minimal threat of causing wanton destruction can now be crossed off

Strange-looking black pouches have been washing up on beaches along North Carolina’s shores. But despite how they might look, they’re not plastic pollution, as officials have reminded the well-meaning public. That’s because they’re actually something much cooler – the egg casings of sea skates. Sometimes known as mermaid’s or devil’s purses, based on their weird

Perhaps one of the world’s best known fossils is Archaeopteryx. With its beautifully preserved feathers, it has long been regarded as the first bird in the fossil record, and is often called “the icon of evolution“. Only a handful of specimens have ever been found, its elusivity adding to its fascination. But was it really

NASA scientists have captured images of an iceberg in Antarctica that looks perfectly rectangular. The photos were taken as part of Operation IceBridge, an ongoing NASA mission to document changes in polar ice. During a flight over the northern Antarctic Peninsula on October 16, scientists captured images of the rectangular iceberg while gathering information on

Well, we didn’t think it was possible, but we should have had more faith in our feathered corvid friends: crows just got even cooler. Researchers have discovered that crows don’t just use single objects as tools; they can also make them out of multiple parts that are individually useless. Let that sink in for a

The beast of an earthquake that rattled Mexico in September of last year has turned out to be even more unusual than we knew. Not only did it hit magnitude 8.2 and produce strange lights in the sky, seismologists have now revealed it also cracked a tectonic plate all the way through. “If you think

Amazon welcomed visitors into its headquarters over the weekend to see a rare corpse flower named Morticia in bloom. The 6-foot-tall (182-centimetre-tall) plant, which is technically called a “titan arum”, sits in the rainforest inside of the Spheres on Amazon’s Seattle campus. The Spheres opened earlier this year, and they’re intended to serve as a

There are plenty of animals that have the ability to count, even without the use of language. But of all the non-human species in the world, the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) appears to be the true mathematician. New research has found that Asian elephants have an exceptional way with numbers that appears to be unique

A expedition to explore a giant sinkhole in the forest of Guangxi, China has resulted in the discovery of a tremendous cave hall complex under the ground. At 6.7 million cubic metres (236 million cubic feet), the cave’s volume is of a rare enormity, making it ‘world class,’ geological experts are reported as saying. The

At first, Ellie McGrath, or E_graaa as she’s known on Reddit, thought that her chicken Belinda was being attacked. “She spent a few minutes hopping up and down and clucking making some crazy noises,” McGrath wrote on Reddit. As it turned out, Belinda, a one-year-old Australorp and Rhode Island Red cross, was at that moment

It is extremely rare that soft tissues survive millions of years the way bones and shells do, so this new discovery is a doozy: palaeontologists have discovered what they think are the fossilised lungs of an ancient bird that lived 120 million years ago, in the Early Cretaceous. It’s a find that could help us

Nature is messy. It’s often geometric, but also riotous and irregular and asymmetrical. Rarely will you see straight edges or 90-degree angles – so when these things show up in a natural environment, it looks really, really weird. Take this iceberg NASA photographed in Antarctica last week as part of Operation IceBridge. Sitting amid a

Tourists on a whale-watching cruise were met with the unexpected sight of two great white sharks, one of which was 6-metres (18-foot) long, eating a dead whale. One hundred and sixty passengers were on the tour in Cape Cod, Massachusetts in the US, on Sunday when they saw the two sharks consuming the fin whale’s

Female chimpanzees may not hold the power in their patriarchal societies, but they do know how to protect themselves and their offspring. Watching from the sidelines, female chimps (Pan troglodytes) are highly sensitive to social changes that may put their babies at risk, new research suggests. And to keep their young safe, they have figured out

For the first time, geologists have confirmed that our planet’s inner core is indeed solid – although not quite as firm as previous models have suggested. Thanks to a new method for detecting soft whispers of seismic waves, analysis of an elusive type of earthquake ripple has revealed key properties of our planet’s deepest layer.

The Jurassic seas were a formidable place – home to sharks, crocodiles, sea monsters, and, apparently, piranha-like, flesh-eating fish. A nearly-complete fossil of a ray-finned bony fish with extra sharp teeth has scientists thinking they’ve found the piranha’s Jurassic equivalent. If they’re right, this would be the oldest evidence of a flesh-eating bony fish belonging

Yellowstone isn’t just a supervolcano. It isn’t just a national park. It’s also a science lab, even if it doesn’t really look like one. And not just any science lab, either, but the site of the “most celebrated ecological experiment in history”, according to a new study. In a broad overview of over 40 years

A contender for the world’s oldest fossil may be out of the running, as recent evidence suggests it could simply be a rock and not a sign of biological life after all. Holding the record for Earth’s earliest-known remnant of life is about as tough as keeping the crown in Game of Thrones. It seems

When you say “squirrel” to your canine companion, are they really picturing a bushy-tailed animal, or are they responding to the call based on cues like the tone of voice or the gestures you’re using? We’d be pretty safe to assume the latter, since language isn’t known to easily work across species. But, according to

You’ve made it to the bank you work at, if a little bleary eyed, and it’s time for the morning staff meeting. Suddenly, a 1.5 metre (5 foot) python plops down from the ceiling literally inches from where you were standing. It sounds like a terrible dream, but that’s exactly what happened last Friday morning

Drinking alcohol is dangerous at the best of times. Intoxication in the treetops really raises the stakes. This impressive albeit risky feat is just one of the many reasons why the kererū pigeon (Hemiphaga novaeseelandiae) is the “absolute unit“. In 2018, this “devourer of fruit” was named Bird Of The Year in New Zealand, winning

Using a newly developed microscopic technique, scientists have been able to create a detailed, 4D image of early mouse embryo development, down to the single cells involved – a fascinating look into the very first stages of life for mammals. The imaging process is technically known as adaptive light-sheet microscopy, and it pushes the boundaries

Of all the prehistoric creatures to find trapped in amber, we never would have expected a snail. But that’s exactly what palaeontologists have found – so perfectly preserved that its delicate shell is intact, and prehistoric soft snail tissues have been observed for the first time. A second, less well-preserved snail shell is also in

When you think of vast organisms, it’s hard not to think of giants like blue whales and redwood trees. But back in the 1980s, it was a single mushroom that broke records and forced a rethink on what it means to be an individual organism. A team of scientists from the US and Canada recently

Hurricane Michael, the most powerful storm the US has seen in nearly 50 years, is moving through the Florida Panhandle, ripping apart homes and sending walls of water rushing inland. The storm made landfall northwest of Mexico Beach around noon on Wednesday, with an eye so clear and wide it could easily be seen from

During the spectacular event of a total solar eclipse, humans emerge blinking from their dens to enjoy the awe-inspiring show. But what of the bees? According to new research, they stop flying and go completely silent. Over the years, scientists have jumped at every opportunity to study animal behaviour during solar eclipses. We know that

Trying to imagine what dinosaurs actually looked like 66 million years ago is no easy task – it involves some painstakingly detailed fossil analysis, some intelligent guesswork, and a bit of creative imagination. As scientific methods develop and new research is published though, our concepts of dinosaur appearances are getting better over time. Now a