Giant sea spiders sit and wait for prey to knock themselves out
Huge sea spiders move excruciatingly slowly, but they can still catch prey animals that move much faster than them – because their prey sometimes crash into the seafloor
A fossil may rewrite the story of how plants first lived on land
A plant fossil that lay unnoticed for a century is unexpectedly large for something so old, and it could upend our ideas about the evolution of land plants
Oxygen may have helped complex life arise a billion years early
Earth’s air suddenly got a lot more oxygen around 1.6 billion years ago and that could have triggered the evolution of large multicellular organisms
Worst mass extinctions may have been caused by rising mountains
A pair of mass extinctions struck in quick succession just before the dinosaur era, and the birth of a mountain range in South Africa may have been partly to blame
Trees may have a ‘heartbeat’ that is so slow we never noticed it
Trees repeatedly move their branches up and down during the night, and this may reflect water being pumped along the branches – just like a human pulse
Flies cool themselves down by constantly blowing bubbles of spit
Blowflies repeatedly blow bubbles of saliva, which look like brown bubble gum – and it turns out this odd behaviour helps them keep cool
Ancient finger bone may reveal humanity’s path out of Africa
A single bone found in the Saudi Arabian desert is at least 85,000 years old, and may shed light on the route early humans took out of Africa
The frogs bouncing back after almost being wiped out by disease
A few amphibian species in Panama are recovering from near-extinction, after apparently evolving resistance to the deadly chytrid fungus
Why ancient deer returned to the sea and became whales
Over the last 250 million years land animals have repeatedly begun exploiting the seas, giving rise to creatures like whales and walruses. The question is why
Our ancestors mated with the mystery ‘Denisovan’ people – twice
The genes of extinct hominins called Denisovans live on in people from China and Papua New Guinea, suggesting two instances of cross-species breeding