Biology

Dinosaurs may be long extinct, but 2025 made it clear that they’re anything but settled science. New fossils, reanalyses of famous specimens and increasingly sophisticated tools have helped us learn more about how they lived, moved, fed and evolved.

Deep underground in a dark, sulfuric cave, scientists have made an incredible discovery – a giant communal spider web spanning more than 1,000 square feet, home to an estimated 110,000 spiders that defy nature to coexist in harmony.

From fleas to mosquitoes, there's no shortage of organisms we consider pests. But thanks to new genetic detective work, scientists have named and shamed the resilient, highly adaptive – and frustratingly hard to kill – bug that got to us first.

For decades, scientists believed that associative learning – understanding that two events are linked to each other – required at least some form of neural machinery. But now, a unicellular creature with no gray matter may upend this assumption.

The warm waters of Mexico and Texas are home to a small fish that has produced nothing but daughters for over 100,000 years. The offspring are the exact genetic copy of their mother, with no father involved. This is the amazing Amazon molly.

In 2023, a great white shark was caught off Spain, leading researchers to analyze historical data. They suggest these rare sightings aren't random anomalies but evidence of a "ghost" population persisting in the Mediterranean over centuries.

In January 2023, an infant monkey made a bad choice at snack time. In a rare discovery, researchers found that by eating a rodent known as a fire-footed rope squirrel, the primate unwittingly spread monkeypox to nearly a third of its troop.

Baby caterpillars have figured out how to get themselves the royal treatment in certain ant colonies – getting carried around like precious cargo, fed on demand, guarded and being rescued from danger – by posing as queen ants.

Researchers have identified a hybrid photoreceptor in the eyes of fish that carries traits of both rods and cones – a combination that doesn’t fit either category. It suggests the retina may be far more flexible than scientists have long assumed.

Some of us get bitten far more often than others – but it seems we each also appear tasty to different species of mosquito. New research illuminates what's making a given individual attractive, and to which mosquitos.

Sometimes, the most important paleontological discoveries may come from the most disgusting materials. A fossilized vomit sample dating back nearly 300 million years revealed how an ancient mammal gorged on all manner of prey.

Male nipples. Whale pelvic bones. Vestigial hind limbs in snakes. Evolution is full of features that look purposeful but are actually by-products with no explicit function. New research suggests the human chin may be one such evolutionary side effect.

In the late 1990s researchers identified the key gene responsible for producing the bitter compounds in grapefruit. Now, using the genome editing technology CRISPR/Cas9, the team has inactivated the gene in grapefruit to eliminate that bitter taste.

For two decades giant viruses have unsettled one of biology’s most fundamental boundaries forcing scientists to rethink how cellular complexity emerged. A newly discovered giant virus sharpens that debate, offering clues about how a key feature of most complex life may have evolved.

The earliest ancestors of all backboned animals, including humans, may have viewed the world with four eyes, not just two, according to a new study. The remnants of those extra eyes persist deep in the human brain today as the pineal organ.

For the first time, researchers have tracked how deer use photoluminescent markers as signposts on trees to communicate with one another. Their unique visual acuity allows them to see in ultraviolet wavelengths invisible to human eyes.

Researchers have discovered a certain kind of sugar that is only found on the surface of bacteria. Targeting it could lead to an entirely new class of immunotherapeutic drugs designed to target and eliminate at least one deadly, drug-resistant bug.

New research has found when plant leaves physically touch each other, they seem to form a biological signalling network to warn each other about upcoming stress. This boosts resilience to intense light, a common environmental challenge.