Thorny skates come in snack and party sizes. After a century of guessing, scientists now know why
When Jeff Kneebone was a college student in 2002, his research involved a marine mystery that has stumped curious scientists…
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A 62-million-year-old skeleton sheds light on an enigmatic mammal
For more than 140 years, Mixodectes pungens, a species of small mammal that inhabited western North America in the early…
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Moths may use disco gene to regulate day/night cycles
How does one species become two? If you’re a biologist, that’s a loaded question. The consensus is that, in most…
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Building a roadmap to bioengineer plants that produce their own nitrogen fertilizer
Nitrogen fertilizers make it possible to feed the world’s growing population, but they are also costly, harm ecosystems and require…
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Florida fossil porcupine solves a prickly dilemma 10-million years in the making
There’s a longstanding debate simmering among biologists who study porcupines. There are 16 porcupine species in Central and South America,…
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Vast DNA tree of life for plants revealed by global science team
A new paper published today in the journal Nature by an international team of 279 scientists led by the Royal…
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Head lice evolution mirrors human migration and colonization in the Americas
A new analysis of lice genetic diversity suggests that lice came to the Americas twice – once during the first…
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Frogs were Florida’s first-known vertebrates from the Caribbean
Deep in the forests of Haiti lives the blue-eyed La Hotte glanded frog (Eleutherodactylus glandulifer), which once went 20 years…
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Move over, armadillos. There’s a new bone-plated mammal in town
Mammals are a bit odd when it comes to bones. Rather than the bony plates and scales of crocodiles, turtles,…
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Butterfly tree of life reveals an origin in North America
About 100 million years ago, a group of trendsetting moths started flying during the day rather than at night, taking…
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