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Study finds parrots can practice acts of kindness.
March 2019
Science Magazine
Parrots are the first birds observed showing kindness to others.
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Ocearch Global Shark Tracker
And in News: Kaya the harbor seal encounters a butterfly
Meet Some of the Members of Our Team
A warming planet threatens fish.
March 2019
National Geographic
The impacts warming waters are having on important fish species.
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Animals have some interesting ways to store food.
October 2018
National Geographic
Not just nuts: The surprising stuff animals hoard for winter
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Birds Keep Insect Populations Under Control.
July 9, 2018
Science Daily
Birds eat 400 – 500 million tons of insects annually!
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Unchecked carbon emissions are pushing species to extinction.
March 14, 2018
WWF
Half of plant and animal species at risk from climate change in the world’s most important natural places
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Artificial intelligence is helping to crack the code of dolphin language.
December 8, 2017
IFLScience!
AI Might Have Identified Six New Types Of Dolphin Clicks.
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Australia has some of the most beautiful birds on the planet.
June 17, 2016
The Guardian
A shortlist of 50 birds which includes some truly spectacular ones.
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Octopus-Inspired Adhesive Uncovers Secret to Cephalopod Stickiness
June 17, 2016
IFLscience.com
An impressive trick in octopus stickiness.
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Why Turtles Evolved Shells:It Wasn’t For Protection
July 14, 2016
theatlantic.com
Turtle shells evolved for digging.
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Key gene enables plants to conquer land
May 19, 2016
www.eurekalert.org
Research identifies a gene that assisted the transition of plants from water to land 500 million years ago.
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Crows count on number neurons
June 8, 2015
www.sciencedaily.com
Crow brains evolved for counting.
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Scientists reconstruct the evolutionary history of whale hearing with rare museum collection
March 11, 2015
www.sciencedaily.com
Tracing the development of hearing in whales.
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Reshaping the horse through millennia: Sequencing reveals genes selected by humans in domestication
December 15, 2014
www.sciencedaily.com
Human domestication shaped the horse.
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Seeing Dinosaur Feathers in a New Light
Oct. 30, 2014
www.sciencedaily.com
Evolution of feathers made dinosaurs colorful.
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Plants may use newly discovered molecular language to communicate.
August 14, 2014
www.sciencedaily.com
Scientific discovery of a potentially new form of plant communication.
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New Fossil Suggests More Complex Evolution for Feathers and Flight
July 2nd, 2014
blogs.discovermagazine.com
A new look at how both feathers and flight may have evolved among theropod dinosaurs -aka- the ancestors of modern birds.
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June 5th, 2014
www.sciencedaily.com
Bees use their ability to ‘see’ polarized light when foraging for food, researchers have discovered. This is the first time bees have been found to use this ability for something other than navigation.
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Wed. March 12, 2014
www.livescience.com
An ancient whale used sound beams to navigate and stalk prey 28 million years ago, an analysis of a new fossil suggests.
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Tue. Jan. 21, 2014
www.livescience.com
A quarter of the world’s sharks and rays are at risk of extinction, according to a new assessment by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Read Full Story
Dec. 22, 2013
Science Daily
Researchers have found new clues to how plants evolved to withstand wintry weather. In a study to appear in the December 22 issue of the journal Nature, the team constructed an evolutionary tree of more than 32,000 species of flowering plants – the largest time-scaled evolutionary tree to date. Read Full Story
September 6, 2013
Science News
Despite being separated by millions of years of evolution, dozens of genes in dolphins and bats changed, in the same manner, to give the species their ability to echolocate. Read Full Story
from four feet to two as it grew
June 28, 2013
Science Daily
Tracking the growth of dinosaurs and how they changed as they grew is difficult. Using a combination of biomechanical analysis and bone histology, paleontologists from Beijing, Bristol, and Bonn have shown how one of the best-known dinosaurs switched from four feet to two as it grew.
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August 2, 2013
Science Daily
A study of gene expression led by scientists at the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and the University of Cambridge has revealed the first steps of evolution in gene regulation in mice. Read Full Story
June 26, 2013
Scientific American
Researchers have recovered DNA from a nearly 700,000-year-old horse fossil and assembled a draft of the animal’s genome from it. It is the oldest complete genome to date by a long shot–hundreds of thousands of years older than the previous record-holder, which came from an archaic human that lived around 80,000 years ago. Read Full Story
Facts About
Animals, Plants & Climate
May 1, 2013
Live Science
The Cretaceous Period was the last and longest segment of the Mesozoic Era. It lasted approximately 79 million years, from the minor extinction event that closed the Jurassic Period about 145.5 million years ago to the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event dated at 65.5 million years ago. Read Full Story
March 13, 2013
Live Science
Researchers in northeastern Spain say they’ve uncovered hundreds of dinosaur egg fossils, including four kinds that had never been found before in the region. The eggs likely were left behind by sauropods millions of years ago. Read Full Story
The Cost Of Big Brains
January 3, 2013
Scientific American
There’s a lot to be said for smarts—at least we humans, with some of the biggest brains in relation to our bodies in the animal kingdom, certainly seem to think so. Read Full Story
The Bat: A Long-lived, Virus-Proof Anomaly
January 1, 2013
Discovery Magazine
Bats are pretty impressive critters. They are notorious for carrying viruses like Ebola and SARS, but somehow avoid getting these diseases themselves. They are the only mammal that can fly, and they live far longer than other mammals their size. What’s their secret? Read Full Story
November 16, 2012
Science Daily
New research from Georgia Aquarium and Georgia Institute of Technology provides evidence that a suite of techniques called “metabolomics” can be used to determine the health status of whale sharks (Rhincodon typus), the world’s largest fish species.
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Can the Burrowing owl population
rebound in North America?
November 16, 2012
Scientific American
Western burrowing owls (Athene cunicularia) are tiny, long-legged members of the owl family, native to the Americas and preferring open landscapes where they can dig new holes or use existing ones (such as abandoned prairie dog, skunk or armadillo homes) to nest and rear their young.
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How Do Octopuses Navigate?
May 24, 2012
Scientific American
Getting around is a complicated business. Every year, animals traverse miles of sky and sea (and land), chasing warmth or food or mates as the planet rotates and the seasons change.
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Common Pesticide Implicated Bee Colony Collapse Disorder
April 6, 2012
Scientific American
Honeybee colonies have been mysteriously dying off all over the globe, leaving scientists scratching their heads—and important crops languishing in the fields unpollinated.
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Evolution – New Scientist – 2/21/12
Get the latest news on evolution from New Scientist magazine.
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Darwin’s Degenerates – Evolution’s Finest | Observations – 2/12/12
Scientific American
153 years ago on November 24th, a naturalist named Charles Darwin published a book with a rather long and cumbersome title.
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Science Daily
A study of South American songbirds completed by the Department of Biology at Queen’s University and the Argentine Museum of Natural History, has discovered these birds differ dramatically in color and song yet show very little genetic differences, indicating they are on the road to becoming a new species.
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Unraveling the Causes of the Ice Age Megafauna Extinctions – 11/2/11
Science Daily
Was it humans or climate change that caused the extinction of the iconic Ice Age mammals (megafauna) such as the woolly rhinoceros and woolly mammoth?
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Scientific American
Earlier this month, scientists for the Pan African Sanctuaries Alliance presented new research that predicted the extinction of the Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes ellioti), the world’s rarest chimpanzee subspecies, within as little as…
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Science Daily
In modern ecology, the removal or addition of a predator to an ecosystem can produce dramatic changes in the population of prey species. For the first time, scientists have observed the same dynamics in the fossil record, thanks to a mass extinction that decimated ocean life 360 million years ago.
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Science Daily
There’s a crisis among the world’s amphibians — about 40 percent of amphibian species have dwindled in numbers in just three decades. Now, museum jars stuffed full of amphibians may help scientists decide whether this wave of extinctions was caused by a fungal infection…
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Scientific Daily
Sometimes there are so many stories about endangered species that not all of them can be covered in depth by this blog. Here are some quick updates on stories previously covered in Extinction Countdown…
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