Animals, features and articles | Educational Science

Nov 21, 2023

Watch rare footage of 2 mini mola swimming together off Canada's Pacific coast

A scuba diver has captured rare footage of two very young sunfish swimming in emerald waters off the coast of British Columbia in Canada. Experts identified the pair as ocean sunfish (Mola mola) and said their angular bellies and small size are telltale signs of their babyness in a Facebook...

Dec 2, 2023

Ocean pout: The fish with antifreeze blood

Name: Ocean pout (Zoarces americanus) Where it lives: Western Atlantic Ocean, ranging from Labrador in Canada to North Carolina, in waters from near the shore to depths of almost 1,300 feet (400 meters). What it eats: Crustaceans such as crabs and amphipods, echinoderms such as brittle stars, sand dollars and...

Jan 10, 2024

Bizarre incident of fish jumping out of water in Philippines caused by upwelling, not earthquake

A countless mass of sardines — likely numbering in the millions — recently beached themselves on an island in the Philippines, turning coastlines silver as tiny dead fish covered the shore. Around 48 hours later, the area was struck by a powerful earthquake, sparking speculation that the fish may have...

Mar 20, 2023

Extinct 'Lord of The Rings' eagles had a 10-foot wingspan and probably could have carried a hobbit

An ancient hulk of an eagle that once soared over Australia shares similarities with the fictional giant eagles from J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings, a new study on the extinct raptors shows. While the real-life giants weren't as enormous as their fictional counterparts (and...

Mar 23, 2023

Scientists want to clone an extinct bison unearthed from Siberian permafrost. Experts are skeptical.

Researchers in Russia recently completed a necropsy, or animal autopsy, on a stunningly intact extinct bison that was unearthed from Siberian permafrost. The tissues recovered during the dissection are so well preserved, the team believes the long-dead specimen could be cloned. But one expert told Live Science that it is...

Apr 10, 2023

25 of the strangest ancient sea monsters

From the creepiest Cambrian critters to massive marine reptiles, wonderfully weird sea creatures have inhabited our oceans for over half a billion years. We've put together a list of 25 of the strangest ancient sea monsters ever to have lived, all of which went extinct long before humans came along....

Apr 21, 2023

230 million-year-old bizarre-beaked reptile was a relative of modern-day crocodiles

During the late Triassic period roughly 230 million years ago, a squat reptile with a beak-like mouth lived in what is now Wyoming. Paleontologists identified the remains of the herbivorous reptile, which is a stem, or early archosaur and therefore a distant relative of modern-day birds and crocodiles, as a...

Apr 24, 2023

Mystery of prehistoric, alien-like tully monster deepens once more

Tully monsters haunted Earth's oceans 300 million years ago and left behind such bizarre fossils that researchers haven't even agreed on whether these strange creatures had backbones. Now, more than 60 years after the strange creature's discovery in 1958, a new investigation using 3D lasers finds that the Tully monster...

May 8, 2023

Mysterious 'golden' fossils from the Jurassic aren’t what they seem

It was long thought that pyrite — a shiny mineral also known as fool's gold — was the special ingredient that gave fossils embedded in Germany's Posidonia Shale their golden glow. But now scientists think something else is causing these fossils to shimmer. Earlier this year, a team of international...

May 12, 2023

Rhino-like 'thunder beasts' grew massive in the evolutionary blink of an eye after dinos died off

In the aftermath of the dinosaur-killing asteroid impact, a second explosion rocked the animal kingdom. This time, it was the mammals that blew up. Rhino-like horse relatives that had lived in the shadow of the dinosaurs became gigantic thunder beasts as suddenly as an evolutionary lightning strike, new research, published...

May 12, 2023

Long-extinct Tasmanian tiger may still be alive and prowling the wilderness, scientists claim

The completely unique, wolf-like Tasmanian tigers that thrived on the island of Tasmania before they went extinct in 1936 may have survived in the wilderness for far longer than previously thought, research suggests. There is also a small possibility they are still alive today, experts say. Tasmanian tigers, also known...

May 24, 2023

Fearsome saber-toothed giant dominated at dawn of 'Great Dying', but its reign was short-lived

At the dawn of the most devastating mass extinction in Earth's history 252 million years ago, species fought tooth and nail to survive in the changing environment. Ancient predators in particular, struggled ruthlessly to stay at the top of the food chain. Now, scientists have discovered that a tiger-size, saber-toothed...

Jun 1, 2023

Nearly 6 million-year-old 'elephant graveyard' unearthed in Florida

An ancient elephant graveyard chock-full of massive bones has been unearthed along what was once a prehistoric river in northern Florida. The fossils of these long-extinct beasts belong to gomphotheres — a relative of modern elephants — and date to about 5.5 million years ago, during the Miocene epoch. It...

Jun 1, 2023

Quarter-ton marsupial that ambled across Australia 3.5 million years ago was 'unlike anything alive today'

Scientists have uncovered the remains of an ancient, quarter-ton marsupial that once walked vast distances across Australia. The new fossils help shed light on mysteries surrounding other, even more gigantic extinct marsupials. The newly described species, Ambulator keanei, had a body plan similar to a bear or rhinoceros. It likely...

Jun 15, 2023

Could the megalodon still exist today?

From 20 million to 3.6 million years ago, Earth's oceans were dominated by an enormous species of shark called the megalodon. The scientific name, Otodus megalodon, means giant tooth — and it's easy to see why. With teeth up to three times the size of those of a great white...