Chimpanzee

In a study published in Science, an international research team from the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center (Egypt) and the University of Southern California (U.S.) describe Masripithecus moghraensis, a newly identified fossil ape that lived about 17–18 million years ago, during the Early Miocene. Recovered from the Wadi Moghra fossil site in northern Egypt, the remains represent the first definitive fossil ape known from North Africa. The finding not only extends the […]

As bees and hummingbirds flit from flower to flower, greedily sipping nectar in exchange for pollination, the animals often get another treat: alcohol. In the first broad analysis of the alcohol content of flower nectars, University of California, Berkeley biologists found detectable alcohol in at least one flower of 26 of the 29 species of plants tested. While most samples had very low levels, almost certainly from yeast fermenting the sugars in the nectar, one contained 0.056% ethanol by […]

In February 2023, a resident at Kyoto University's Center for the Evolutionary Origins of Human Behavior—EHUB—treated researchers to a spontaneous musical performance. Ayumu, a 26-year-old male chimpanzee, removed floorboards from a walkway and used them to drum while he let out complex and structured sounds similar to vocal expressions. It was something the researchers had never seen him do before.

Like the males of many animal species, male Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies, a commonly studied lab animal, are aggressive toward one another and even fight when competing for resources such as food and females. Researchers in the lab of David Anderson have been studying aggression in these insects for decades, elucidating the neural basis for heightened aggression in males, among other discoveries.

The More You Know: This week, researchers successfully reconstructed videos from the brain activity of mice. According to a new study, female birds are more likely to sing when their extended families help with childcare. And mathematicians have disproven a decades-old classical geometry rule by constructing two compact, self-contained torus objects that have the same metric and mean curvature but are structurally different on a global scale. So that's neat.