Beneath the crushing pressures and near-boiling waters of the Indian Ocean’s abyss crawls a creature so bizarre it seems ripped from science fiction. The scaly-foot snail (Chrysomallon squamiferum) also called the “volcano snail” or “sea pangolin” is a living paradox: an iron-armored mollusk with a heart the size of a pea in a body no ...
Deep within the unmapped depths of the Brazilian Amazon, where the rain forest reverberates with life unseen by human eye, researchers have chanced upon an animal so dramatic it appears to have been plucked from legend. Step forward Ranitomeya aetherea, a recently found poison dart frog with its glistening sky-blue stripes, a living gem concealed ...
Flamingos, in their bright pink feathers and upright posture, have been long symbols of grace and peace. But beneath their peaceful facade exists an unexpectedly fierce and clever strategy for feeding. New studies show that these birds are anything but passive filter feeders, they’re actually underwater predators, harnessing physics to generate teeny-tiny tornadoes that catch ...
South Africa’s biodiversity isn’t simply a cache of exotic species, it’s also a living repository of cultural history. For decades, scientific literature has compiled frogs and reptiles in Latin names, so the Indigenous nomenclature for these animals is dispersed and unrecorded. And now, in a trailblazing research led by zoologist Fortunate Phaka, the first comprehensive ...
