Biology

Some animals sustain grave injuries and may struggle to return to full health, while others possess a remarkable ability to regenerate damaged tissue. A new study suggests whale sharks may have more in common with the latter group than previously thought.

Scientists at the University of Buffalo have found a very useful clue shedding light on the migration of canines to the Americas, in the DNA of an ancient bone fragment thought to be the oldest confirmed dog remains in the region.

If you were a marine animal that just sat and waited for food to drift by, you might not choose to live in a place where little life is believed to exist. Nonetheless, such critters have recently been found deep beneath an Antarctic ice shelf.

Scientists have studied 50,000-year-old Neanderthal poop, and analyzed the DNA of microbes to determine their gut microbiome. Many species are still present in modern humans, revealing the "old friend" bacteria that may be most crucial to our health.

By analyzing the way butterflies rapidly take flight in wind tunnel experiments, scientists have uncovered new detail around how the insects evade predators, using their wings to help generate small jets to propel them through the air.

Wombats are the only animal in the world known to produce cubic poo. It's, quite literally, akin to squeezing a square peg through a round hole, and now researchers have for the first time replicated the intestinal process that achieves this feat.

Just last year, scientists declared that Spinosaurus was the first dinosaur known to swim through the water, preying upon fish as it did so. A new study, however, suggests that it was probably more of a shore-based feeder.

Scientists have sequenced the genome of a “living fossil” from the time our ancestors first crawled out of the oceans. The Australian lungfish genome is the largest of any animal sequenced so far, revealing it to be our closest living fish relative.

Probably the world's most famous family of dinosaurs, the tyrannosaurs included the 40-ft (12-m) Tyrannosaurus rex within their ranks. Newly studied fossils now suggest that the reptiles were about "the size of a border collie" when first hatching.

Inflammation in the human body is a complex physiological response to a complex range of triggers, and scientists have just uncovered some useful new details about how it works by experimenting with muscles grown in the lab.

For decades, scientists have sought to understand how the present-day starfish came to be. Newly analyzed fossils should help, as they represent a transitional step between the starfish and the family tree it branched off of.

Tyrannosaurus rex may have ruled the land in the time of the dinosaurs, but the mosasaur was likely the most ferocious reptile in the sea. A new species of the creature was recently classified, which distinguished itself with teeth like those of a shark.