A Madagascan marbled praying mantis grabs at a dangling fly. New slow-motion video shows how praying mantises snatch their prey with lightning-fast, deadly precision. Though these strikes are completed in microseconds, the long-armed predators calibrate their attacks even more quickly…
The baby hippo is mama Mabel’s first calf. The San Diego Zoo recently announced its newest (and arguably cutest) arrival: a newborn male pygmy hippo, born on April 9 to its 4-year-old pygmy hippo mama Mabel. Within hours of birth,…
The U.S. launched espionage satellites during the Cold War to locate Soviet missile sites, but in doing so, they also captured photos of animals and their historic habitats, Science magazine reported. Now, scientists have put these 1960s snapshots to new…
Bones found in Tanque Loma represent 22 sloths; adults and juveniles. During the Ice Age, a group of giant ground sloths died together after swallowing their own feces in a contaminated pool of shallow water. Scientists discovered the bones of…
A still from a video fly-through of the brain map shows a slice of mouse brain. No, you’re not looking at a psychedelic Millennium Falcon: This flickering, ghostly image is the most detailed view of a mouse brain ever seen.…
A magnified image showing the damaged head and body of the fish, with the arms of the squid-like creature clamped around it. An ancient squid-like creature with 10 arms covered in hooks had just crushed the skull of its prey…
The Great Lakes — Superior, Huron, Michigan, Ontario and Erie — make up the largest body of fresh water on Earth, accounting for one-fifth of the freshwater surface on the planet at 6 quadrillion gallons. The area of all the…
Vespa mandarinia, or Asian giant hornets, as also known as “yak-killer hornets,” “murder hornets,” and “hornets from hell.” Massive, deadly hornets affectionately known as “murder hornets” “hornets from hell” and “yak-killer hornets,” have been spotted in the U.S. for the…
An illustration of the Tully monster, a weird creature with hammerhead-like eyes and a slender snout. There are few ancient creatures as controversial as the Tully monster, a bowling-pin-sized oddity with eyes like a hammerhead that lived about 307 million…
A whale shark vertebra from Pakistan, in cross section, showing 50 growth bands Whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) are the largest living fish in the world, averaging about 32 feet (10 meters) long and weighing tens of thousands of pounds each.…