Leonora, a 46-year-old female in the Ngogo community of chimpanzees in Kibale National Park in Uganda. She last gave birth at age 34.Credit...Kevin Langergraber/Arizona State University

A tooth found inside of a mountain cave in Laos has solved one of the biggest scientific mysteries of the Denisovans, a branch of ancient humans that disappeared roughly 50,000 years ago. Since 2010, when Denisovan teeth and finger bones were first discovered, DNA testing has revealed that the enigmatic hominins were among the ancestors of people alive today in Australia and the Pacific. But scien

When choosing between life and limb, many animals willingly sacrifice the limb. The ability to drop appendages is known as autotomy, or self-amputation. When backed into a corner, spiders let go of legs, crabs drop claws and some small rodents shed clumps of skin. Some sea slugs will even decapitate themselves to rid themselves of their parasite-infested bodies. But lizards may be the best-known u

Noise and chaos reign at the heart of the Milky Way, our home galaxy, or so it appears in an astonishing image captured recently by astronomers in South Africa. The image, taken by the MeerKAT radio telescope, an array of 64 antennas spread across five miles of desert in northern South Africa, reveals a storm of activity in the central region of the Milky Way, with threads of radio emission laced

It’s not every day you find a dinosaur that defended itself from predators with a completely unique weapon. In a study published Wednesday in Nature, Chilean researchers announced the discovery of a new species of ankylosaur, a family of dinosaurs known for their heavy armor, from subantarctic Chile. The animal, which they named Stegouros elengassen, offers new clues about where these tank-like di

A reconstruction of a Viking-age church at Norstead, Newfoundland, near the L’Anse aux Meadows, site of a settlement of Vikings who were present in 1021.Credit...Glenn Nagel Photography Six decades ago, a husband-and-wife team of archaeologists discovered the remains of a settlement on the windswept northern tip of Newfoundland. The site’s eight timber-framed structures resemble Viking buildings i

When our sun enters its death throes in about five billion years, it will incinerate our planet and then dramatically collapse into a dead ember known as a white dwarf. But the fate of more distant planets, such as Jupiter or Saturn, is less clear. On Wednesday in the journal Nature, astronomers reported observing a tantalizing preview of our solar system’s afterlife: a Jupiter-size planet orbitin

Allison Draper loved anatomy class. As a first-year medical student at the University of Miami, she found the language clear, precise, functional. She could look up the Latin term for almost any body part and get an idea of where it was and what it did. The flexor carpi ulnaris, for instance, is a muscle in the forearm that bends the wrist — exactly as its name suggests. Then one day she looked up

At the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, cylindrical clusters of the glass sponge Euplectella aspergillum jut upward like skyscrapers in the deep sea. Some house tiny shrimp, to whom an 11-inch sponge is essentially a high-rise. And the sponge’s glass skeleton is certainly a feat of architecture, comprising a geometric latticework that gives the sponge the illusion of being wrapped in lace. Yet it is e

Imagine a bunch of beetles minding their own business on an algae-covered rock. All of a sudden, they get hoovered up whole into the beak of a slim, long-necked dinosaur ancestor. R.I.P. — but on the bright side, through a complex combination of luck and microbial activity, their tiny corpses become frozen in time. And over 200 million years later, scientists uncover them while rooting around in f

Scientists on Friday announced that a massive fossilized skull that is at least 140,000 years old is a new species of ancient human, a finding that could potentially change prevailing views of how — and even where — our species, Homo sapiens, evolved. The skull belonged to a mature male who had a huge brain, massive brow ridges, deep set eyes and a bulbous nose. It had remained hidden in an abando

Betelgeuse, to put it most politely, burped. In the autumn of 2019 the star, a red supergiant at the shoulder of the constellation Orion the Hunter, began to dim drastically to less than half its usual brightness, and some astronomers worried — or perhaps were hoping — that it would explode in a supernova. Astronomers now say that dust was the culprit in the Great Dimming and that Betelgeuse itsel

Thomas Brock, a microbiologist, was driving west to a laboratory in Washington State in 1964 when he stopped off at Yellowstone National Park. “I’d never seen Yellowstone before,” he said in an interview in 2017. “I came in the south entrance, got out of my car, and there were all these thermal areas spreading out from the hot springs into the lake. I was stunned by the microbes that were living i

If you were to gaze skyward in the late Cretaceous, you might catch a glimpse of surreal flying giants with wingspans that rival small planes. This supersized group of pterosaurs, known as azhdarchids, included species that measured 33 feet between wingtips, which made them the largest animals that ever took to the air. The extreme dimensions of azhdarchids raise tantalizing questions, such as how

It is telling, the entomologist Eleanor Spicer Rice writes in her introduction to a new book of ant photography by Eduard Florin Niga, that humans looking downward on each other from great heights like to describe the miniaturized people we see below us as looking “like ants.” By this we mean faceless, tiny, swarming: an indecipherable mass stripped of individuality or interest. Intellectually, th

Ninety-nine million years ago, a 55-foot dinosaur stalked the river deltas of North Africa. A sail on its back towered over the water as its crocodile-like jaws and curved claws made short work of car-size fish. This was Spinosaurus, discovered in 1915. Paleontologists have since debated how this creature lived. Did it prowl through currents in pursuit of prey, as recent research has suggested, or