Terrestrial Animal

Learn why a comprehensive comparison of crocodile skulls, teeth, and jaws hints that generalists, not specialists are best built for longevity.

New research from the University of Bristol provides evidence that many mammals were already shifting toward a more ground-based lifestyle leading up to the end-Cretaceous mass extinction that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

Learn more about the mammalian transition from arboreal to terrestrial life, which began millions of years before the arrival of the asteroid that devastated the dinosaurs.

Over 4.5 billion years, volcanoes, asteroids, and climate change have wiped out millions of species.

Fiji's 'outlier' iguana population made it there within the last 34 million years.

Researchers find that Fiji iguanas are most closely related to the North American desert iguana — evidence of the longest known transoceanic dispersal of any land animal

Paleontologists have described a new genus and species of extinct scorpion from the Early Cretaceous Yixian Formation of China.

New research reveals how hundreds of species influence Earth's surface processes, from vast termite mounds visible from space to hippos carving drainage systems and beavers creating entire wetlands.

Young sea turtles don't just live in the deep ocean, as previously thought. They appear to be active swimmers, not just drifting on currents. The post Juvenile sea turtles might be active swimmers first appeared on EarthSky.

Paleoanthropologists have found 1.95-million-year-old cut-marked bones that appear to have been made by early hominins using stone tools at the site of Grăunceanu in Romania.

BALI, Indonesia — "We didn't have electricity in our village of Taro, near Ubud, until I was 12 years old," says conservationist Wayan Wardika. To find their way through the rice fields at night, Wardika and his schoolfriends would capture fireflies and put them in jam jars, so they could use them as lanterns. "We […]

Microplastics, defined as plastic particles less than 5 mm in size, have become a pervasive environmental contaminant detected across a wide range of ecosystems. While the presence of microplastics in marine life and humans has been extensively documented, there remains a significant gap in understanding their full health impacts. Moreover, the effects of microplastics on animals, particularly those in close…

A "sassy sparkler."

Geckos use the saccule -- a part of their inner ear traditionally associated with maintaining balance and body positioning -- to detect low-frequency vibrations, according to a duo of biologists.

Freshwater ecosystems in Canada and around the world are under siege.

A new genus and species of non-hadrosaurid hadrosauroid dinosaur, named Qianjiangsaurus changshengi, has been identified from a specimen found in 2022 in southwest China.

De-extinction — the science of resurrecting extinct species — is progressing in leaps and bounds. Here are six creatures that researchers could bring back to life.

Conservationists said Saturday that they plan to bomb a remote South African island with tons of pesticide-laced pellets to kill mice that are eating albatrosses and other seabirds alive.

Exactly when and how humans dispersed into and through the Pacific remains an intensely debated topic. Previous studies have been hampered by imprecise chronometric dating, making the exact timing and movement of people into the Pacific difficult to ascertain.

The ancestors of millipedes, called euthycarcinoids, evolved in warm tidal nursery pools from juvenile arthropods.