Animals

By Katie Hunt, CNN Scientists have found the earliest known evidence of cooking at an archaeological site in Israel. The shift from eating raw to cooked food was a dramatic turning point in human evolution, and the discovery has suggested prehistoric humans were able to deliberately make fires to cook food at least 780,000 years

By Zoe Sottile, CNN If you listen closely, your pet turtle might just have something to say to you. A new study published in Nature Communications has identified sounds made by 53 species, many of which were previously thought to be mute. Fifty of the species were turtles, with tuataras (a kind of reptile found

By Ashley Strickland, CNN As Antarctica’s emperor penguins are increasingly threatened by the climate crisis, the flightless seabirds will receive new protections under the Endangered Species Act, or ESA. With global warming melting the sea ice the penguins depend on for their survival, the US Fish and Wildlife Service now categorizes the species as threatened.

By Hafsa Khalil, CNN Swarms of honeybees can generate as much electrical charge as a thunderstorm, new research shows. In a study published in the journal iScience on Monday, researchers from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom discovered this phenomenon by chance. Biologist Ellard Hunting, first author on the study, told CNN that

By Hafsa Khalil, CNN The world’s wildlife populations plummeted by an average of 69% between 1970 and 2018, a dangerous decline resulting from climate change and other human activity, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) warned in a report Thursday. WWF tracked global changes in the abundance of wildlife across land, air and water

By Zoe Sottile, CNN A new study says that the risk poaching poses to endangered sea turtles is on the decline — although data on the subject is scarce. The study, published on September 7 in Global Change Biology, used a meta-analysis of documents published in the last three decades to estimate the number of

By Katie Hunt, CNN It’s a hard-fought paleontological debate. Did the massive asteroid that struck Earth 66 million years ago wipe out a thriving and diverse population of dinosaurs, or were they already struggling to survive when that cataclysmic day dawned? Most information on dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous era comes from what

By Angus Watson and Heather Chen, CNN Rescue teams have managed to save 32 pilot whales following a mass stranding this week in a remote part of in Australia that saw the deaths of around 200 whales. The stranded pod had been discovered by Tasmanian wildlife officials on Monday — at which time, half of

By Amarachi Orie, CNN Ants are tiny in size but not in number. There are about 20 quadrillion ants on the Earth at any given time, a new study has estimated. That’s 20,000 trillion individuals. The estimate is two to 20 times higher than previous ones, according to the study, published in the journal Proceedings

By Lianne Kolirin, CNN The world’s oldest mammal has been identified using fossil dental records — predating the previously confirmed earliest mammal by about 20 million years — in a new discovery hailed as “very significant” by researchers. Brasilodon quadrangularis was a small shrew-like creature, around 20 centimeters (8 inches) long, that walked the earth

By Zoe Sottile, CNN Faster than any shark alive today and big enough to eat an orca in just five bites: A new study suggests the extinct shark known as a megalodon was an even more impressive superpredator than scientists realized before. The Otodus megalodon, the inspiration behind the 2018 film “The Meg,” lived more

By Ashley Strickland, CNN A tiny fish that lives in the icy waters off the coast of Greenland may be unassumingly small, but scientists have found it’s exceptional in more ways than one. The variegated snailfish is full of naturally occurring antifreeze proteins at previously unseen levels that help it survive in subzero waters, according