A trace fossil of an iguana burrow was discovered on San Salvador Island in the Bahamas. Estimated to be 115,000 years old, it is the first known fossil of its kind.
Caribbean spiny lobsters normally live in groups, but healthy lobsters avoid members of their own species if they are infected with a deadly virus.
Humberto Ramirez/Getty Images
Faced with uncertain and anxious times, brains send out instructions to start stockpiling supplies – whether you're a person facing a pandemic, or a rodent prepping for a long winter.
Kea were able to correctly guess the most probable scenarios, by evaluating various physical and social cues. Previously, only great apes and humans were known to be able to understand probability.
Individuals working together as one.
Orit Peleg and Jacob Peters
A swarm of honeybees can provide valuable lessons about how a group of many individuals can work together to accomplish a task, even with no one in charge. Roboticists are taking notes.
Imitation is the sincerest form of being human?
Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock.com
A quirk of psychology that affects the way people learn from others may have helped unlock the complicated technologies and rituals that human culture hinges on.
A capuchin monkey in Brazil hoists a stone tool to crack open nuts.
Luca Antonio Marino
Capuchin monkeys in Brazil use big stones to crush the shells of nuts they want to eat. An experiment in the field investigated how these monkeys prepare to use new, unfamiliar tools.
Therizinosaurs and their fossilised eggs.
Mark Witton/Kohei Tanaka
Have a cat who just loves to scratch? Declawing is a major surgery that comes with serious long-term side effects – and it might not solve the problem anyway.
A male guppy looks good when he looks different.
Mitchel Daniel
After Google suggested PigeonRank was at the root of its search function, a group of researchers put a small flock of the birds to a different classification test in real life.
Tim Caro, University of California, Davis and Martin How, University of Bristol
How the zebra got its stripes is not only a just-so story, but an object of scientific inquiry. New research suggests that stripes help zebras evade biting flies and the deadly diseases they carry.
A new statistical test lets scientists figure out if two groups are similar to one another.
paleontologist natural/shutterstock.com
Evangeline Rose, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Kevin Omland, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Thomas Mathew, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
A new statistical test lets researchers search for similarities between groups. Could this help keep new important findings out of the file drawer?
Hormone signals help ready worker mole-rats to treat pups as their own.
belizar/Shutterstock.com
Worker naked mole-rats take care of their colony's young even though they aren't the pups' actual parents. New research suggests the queen gets them ready via hormones in her poop.
Cells that transmit nerve impulses in the part of elephants' brains responsible for functions such as learning and memory are structured differently from those of any other mammal.
You can’t resist the yawn.
Chayanin Wongpracha/Shutterstock.com
Everybody does it, but why? Scientists aren't really sure if exhaustion, stress or some other social factor is at the root of yawning – and how it can be so contagious.