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The horn-like knobs on a giraffe's head can be a deadly lightning rod

The horn-like knobs on a giraffe's head can be a deadly lightning rod

16 September 2020

Being the tallest animals on the planet, giraffes are threatened by lightning strikes. For the first time scientists have described in detail such a hit, which killed two giraffes in South Africa


Ancient mammoth tusk found in Siberia is engraved with fighting camels

Ancient mammoth tusk found in Siberia is engraved with fighting camels

9 July 2020

A 13,000-year-old mammoth tusk has engravings of camels fighting and being hunted, plus an image of a human with a camel’s hump on their body


Person wearing spacesuit

Self-cleaning spacesuits could help astronauts cope with Martian dust

4 January 2019

Mars and the Moon are covered in abrasive dust that will stick to and shred spacesuits – but not if those spacesuits are made using non-stick carbon nanotube-based materials


African clawed frog

Cannibalistic African clawed frog eats tadpoles of its relatives

23 December 2018

The African clawed frog likes to dine on its own tadpoles – but it prefers those belonging to the endangered Cape platanna frog


Tree rings reveal plague hit medieval Europe’s construction industry

Tree rings reveal plague hit medieval Europe’s construction industry

4 October 2018

Dating timber used to build European houses between AD 1250 and 1699 reveals that building activity fell during the Black Death and the Thirty Years’ War


A close-up of the gynandromorph cricket

Rare half-female, half-male cricket leads a complicated life

27 July 2018

An extremely rare cricket with female sex organs but male wings  –  known as a gynandromorph – could tell us more about how sex differences arise


When a daddy longlegs is attacked by a flatworm things get messy

When a daddy longlegs is attacked by a flatworm things get messy

14 June 2018

In the forests of Brazil, pitched gladiatorial contests are being fought between flatworms armed with slime and spider-like arachnids with body-chopping spikes


Giant sea spiders sit and wait for prey to knock themselves out

Giant sea spiders sit and wait for prey to knock themselves out

2 May 2018

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


Cute but dim quolls have been taught to stop eating toxic toads

Cute but dim quolls have been taught to stop eating toxic toads

27 April 2018

Northern quolls are an endangered species thanks to an epidemic of poisonous cane toads in Australia, but now some of them have been trained to steer clear


Lost shark seen for first time in a decade - in a fish market

Lost shark seen for first time in a decade - in a fish market

13 April 2018

Photographs of a Ganges river shark snapped at a fish market in Mumbai are the first confirmed record of the species for more than a decade


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