Most small amphibious mammals have a diminished sense of smell, a quality that likely arose because of a tradeoff with thermoregulation capacities that allowed them to conserve heat in aquatic environments.
A new study finds that the extinct European cave bear’s large sinuses represent a tradeoff between hibernation length and the flexibility of their diets.
Scans of eight fossilized adult and infant Australopithecus afarensis skulls reveal a prolonged period of brain growth during development that may have set the stage for extended childhood learning in later hominins.
Super-resolution imaging identifies abnormalities in the hair-like protrusions on a cell’s surface and may help facilitate earlier detection of primary ciliary dyskinesia.
A wildlife camera trap survey of critically endangered West African lions finds they have no preference for parks over trophy-hunting areas, possibly because of poor habitat quality in the no-hunting zones.
A fluorescent image of murine hippocampal cells is the winning microscopy image from more than 400 submissions from 65 countries for Olympus’s 2019 Image of the Year Award.
The newly described Ikaria wariootia was a small, wormlike creature that marked an important evolutionary step between early multicellular organisms and more complex modern animals.