39+ min ago   (83+ words) When the first fish lineage crawled onto land some 375 million years ago, its fins had to be remodeled into limbs capable of bearing weight. Evolutionary biologists have long focused on the genes that pattern the skeleton—Hox clusters, Sonic hedgehog,…...

2+ hour, 11+ min ago   (568+ words) Beneath the sun-baked soils of eastern and southern Africa, a family of rodents has quietly rewritten the rules of mammalian life. Naked mole-rats resist cancer, tolerate near-anoxic conditions and barely age. Damaraland mole-rats dig elaborate tunnel networks and live in…...

4+ hour, 24+ min ago   (640+ words) The University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture has unveiled an ambitious new fellowship designed to reshape how the next generation of animal science professionals is trained. Known as F.U.S.E....

8+ hour, 53+ min ago   (325+ words) Pregnancy can last just a few weeks in some animals, while others carry their young for many months. But there is one animal whose pregnancy is so long that it can stretch to almost two years. So, which animal has…...

6+ hour, 46+ min ago   (695+ words) For nearly two decades, behavioural ecologists have been fascinated by the fact that animals are not simply bundles of independent traits. A bold individual tends to be an aggressive one; a curious animal often takes more risks. These consistent suites…...

7+ hour, 1+ min ago   (681+ words) Across the flooded fields and scrubby foothills of South Asia lives a frog that most people, including many biologists, would struggle to tell apart from its close relatives. The burrowing frog Sphaerotheca maskeyi, a medium-sized member of the family Dicroglossidae,…...

8+ hour, 22+ min ago   (94+ words) Insects navigate their world largely through smell, relying on an intricate array of chemosensory proteins to detect everything from host plant volatiles to mating signals. Among these molecular sentinels are ionotropic receptors, or IRs, a family of receptors descended from…...

10+ hour, 19+ min ago   (607+ words) Deep inside the mammalian placenta, a quiet genetic tug-of-war shapes how much a growing fetus asks of its mother....

17+ hour, 4+ min ago   (48+ words) ...

17+ hour, 55+ min ago   (388+ words) Fifteen foxes. That was the count on San Miguel Island at the end of the 1990s, on an island that had carried about 450 of them, a population so small that biologists could have known every animal by name and very nearly…...