Buronius manfredschmidi nov. gen. et sp. photographs. Upper panel: holotype left upper M2 (GPIT/MA/13005), A–occlusal, B–buccal, C–lingual, D–mesial, E–distal. Lower panel: paratype left lower P4 (GPIT/MA/13004), F–occlusal, G–buccal, H–lingual, I–mesial, J–distal. Scale bars equal 10 mm. (Credit: Böhme et al., 2024, PLOS ONE, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/))A team of researchers reported a new species, Buronius manfredschmidi, that they estimated w ...read more

We know that humans evolved in Africa from our ape-like ancestors, starting around 6 million years ago. We came down from the trees, began to walk upright, found fire, hunted and gathered, constructed weapons and tools, and then some of us migrated out of Africa.In time, Homo sapiens spread all over the world and became the only remaining hominins after Neanderthals died out around 40,000 years ago.But while we know that H. sapiens started in Africa before populating the rest of the planet, for ...read more

Have you ever played hide-and-seek in a new place? It’s much harder than playing at home. You only know the obvious hiding spots: under the bed, in the closet, behind the couch. The trick is trying to think of hiding spots you can’t even imagine. How do you search in places you never thought could be hiding spots?That is kind of what scientists like me do when we look for alien life; we’re trying to think of new ways to look for life. In the meantime, we’re looking for life by looking fo ...read more

Saying “hi” can be complicated. That greeting’s meaning can be altered by the tone of your voice, the tilt of your head, your eye contact, and whether and how you raise and wave your hand. And the nature of a hand wave could differ if it’s directed toward one person, a group, someone new, or someone familiar.It turns out that greetings — and communication in general — by elephants is equally nuanced. Over the past few decades, researchers have explored three “C’s” of elephant c ...read more

Normandy’s beaches bear more than memories of D-Day, the 1944 landing of some 130,000 Allied troops in Nazi-occupied France during World War II. Another human species once stalked those grounds.About 80,000 years before WWII, when the shore lay several miles farther out, Neanderthals camped on the dunes of what is now Normandy. Butchering prey, fashioning stone tools, building fires — as the group busied themselves with daily chores, they left hundreds of footprints in the mud.Sands swept ov ...read more

It’s the season for emergences, whether you’re a dragonfly, firefly, periodical cicada or fly fishing enthusiast! The warm weather brings a variety of citizen science opportunities, some of them fleeting, so we hope you can get outdoors and experience the wonders of nature with your friends and family, and help document them for the many researchers trying to understand and preserve them.Dragonfly SwarmA female blue dasher dragonfly (Pachydiplax longipennis) gazes out at her blog-reading aud ...read more

The world is rich with sound — birdsong, rainfall, children playing in a park, traffic on a busy street, a crowd cheering at a sporting event. But for some people, rather than enriching life, sound can make life nigh unbearable.A condition called hyperacusis, sometimes called sound sensitivity, is a rare hearing disorder in which sounds that typically don’t bother most people seem particularly loud and uncomfortable. Some common sounds that are unbearable to people with hyperacusis are water ...read more

Have you ever walked into a room and then wondered why you went there?If you’ve experienced this phenomenon, you’ve had a prospective memory lapse.Memory usually means remembering things that have already happened. But prospective memory is the ability to remember to do something in the future – such as stopping to get milk on the way home from work, calling your mom on her birthday or remembering to take your casserole out of the oven. Sometimes, errors lead to heartbreaking results – s ...read more

Everything in biology ultimately boils down to food and sex. To survive as an individual you need food. To survive as a species you need sex.Not surprisingly then, the age-old question of why giraffes have long necks has centered around food and sex. After debating this question for the past 150 years, biologists still cannot agree on which of these two factors was the most important in the evolution of the giraffe’s neck. In the past three years, my colleagues and I have been trying to get to ...read more

Neanderthals stopped roaming Earth around 40,000 years ago. Yet as time passes, new technologies are helping scientists learn more about Homo neanderthalensis, how they might have lived, and what similarities they may have shared with Homo sapiens. There’s even a debate about what Neanderthals sounded like.  Scientists have long debated whether Neanderthals were capable of speech. Some argue that Neanderthals lacked the anatomical ability to even produce sounds.In the 1980s, scientists disco ...read more