344 stories
Ah, summer. Time for weekend drives and family vacations. Tourist towns all over the country are gearing up for an influx of visitors. But for one city in Colorado, it’s the elk that will be arriving in droves, in this warmest season.
Right now, Earth is experiencing an amazing natural event—one you may not even have noticed if you haven’t been looking directly at the sun, as your mother wisely warned. A very large sunspot has been tracking across our nearest star and is about to face directly toward our planet.
All animal mothers seem to share one common trait: a fierce desire to protect their young. In fact, sometimes that desire becomes a little too overbearing, and moms begin to cross the line into what’s known as “helicopter parenting.”
In September 2008 while their boat was in the Sea of Cortez between Isla Ángel de la Guarda and Bahia de los Angeles, Mexico, some fishermen encountered a pod of dolphins.
Eagle watchers—and just about all of us in North America—are familiar with the well-documented athletic abilities of our national emblem, the bald eagle. You’ve seen countless films of them, noiselessly swooping down upon unsuspecting fish, swiping them up with strong, sharp talons and then soaring away for the land to indulge in a tasty meal.
When a single whale or dolphin strands itself on a beach, it is usually very sick. When those animals strand themselves in groups, however, other, unknown factors are probably at play. There are several theories as to why groups of whales will sometimes swim onto beaches around the world.
Very little is known about how animals other than ourselves—especially nonhuman primates—react to the deaths of those close to them and whether they “mourn,” as we interpret the feeling.
Although they resemble small bears, wolverines actually belong to the weasel family.
Campephilus imperialis (the imperial woodpecker) may have been the largest woodpecker that ever lived. The last documented sighting of this two-foot-tall bird happened in 1956 in the state of Durango, in the high-altitude, old-growth pine forest of the Sierra Madre in Mexico.
Curiosity can lead to wondrous things, as every scientist knows. And it certainly did recently for Dr. Howard Falcon-Lang at the British Geological Survey. Poking around in a dusty corner in the survey’s archives, Falcon-Lang happened to come across an old cabinet.
Watch as a narwhal dentist travels to the Arctic to attempt to discover just what function a narwhal’s nine-foot tooth may play.
When we read about a rhinoceros species that just went extinct in Vietnam, or the plight of polar bears and how we could lose them in 40 years, or the countless other news items about continuing habitat degradation and the loss of biodiversity on Earth, well, it tends to get a little depressing.
