Early one morning last month, Laura Dudley Plimpton found herself in Forest Park, in Queens, staring at a pair of captured raccoons. It was not the first time that Ms. Plimpton, an ecologist at Columbia University, had caught two of them in a cage trap designed for one. But typically when that happened, she would […]
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For a 7,600-pound Asian elephant, simply putting one foot in front of the other can be a high-stakes proposition: A trip or tumble can result in grievous injury. “The bigger you are, the harder you fall,” said John Hutchinson, an expert on large animal locomotion at the Royal Veterinary College in Britain. “If an elephant […]
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Millions of years ago, this desert in Peru was a gathering place for fantastical sea creatures: whales that walked, dolphins with walrus faces, sharks with teeth as large as a human face, red-feathered penguins, aquatic sloths. They reproduced in the gentle waters of a shallow lagoon buffered by hills that still wrap across the landscape […]
Read More Millions of years ago, this desert in Peru was a gathering place for fantastical sea creatures: whales that walked, dolphins with walrus faces, sharks with teeth as large as a human face, red-feathered penguins, aquatic sloths. They reproduced in the gentle waters of a shallow lagoon buffered by hills that still wrap across the landscape […]
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The pangolin is an absurd animal, a mammal that’s dressed up as a reptile with a coat of scales, sharp claws and sticky saliva. Wildlife experts often say they are the most trafficked mammals in the world as poachers target pangolins for their meat and their scales, which are used in traditional medicines. There are […]
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Usually, you go to the zoo to look at live animals. But at the Great Plains Zoo in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, people also went to see the dead ones. The attraction, called the Delbridge Museum of Natural History, hosted one of the most impressive taxidermy collections in the country, with some 150 animals from […]
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By the time Matvey Nikelshparg was 13, he was obsessed with parasitoid wasps, tiny insects that lay their eggs on or inside other bugs. Under a microscope in a lab he had assembled at home, he discovered that one species had a startling superpower: It could use an organ that protrudes from its abdomen to […]
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For hundreds of millions of years, pancake-shaped animals the size of a needle tip have been roving the seas with an appetite for tasty microbes and algae. They’re called placozoans, and are among the simplest of the major animal lineages. As simple as they are, a team of researchers has found compelling evidence of neuron-like […]
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