Crow

Life was never easy for the Pacific Coast's western snowy plover.

When I experienced a great loss in in my early forties—almost a year to the day after another—I went to see my mother in the family home. She wasn't a hugger or giver of advice, so instead we fed the birds. As she had when I was a child, she stood behind me in the kitchen with her shoulder propped against the back door, passing slices of apple and small balls of minced meat into my hand.

Neanderthals, our closest relatives, became extinct between 40,000 to 35,000 years ago. Since the discovery of the first Neanderthal fossil 165 years ago, scientists have learned more about Neanderthals—including their culture, sociality, ecology, diet, control of fire, production and use of tools, physiology, and even their genomic code—than about any other non-human hominin. Here, Spanish researchers use a highly original approach—scientific "role play"—to reconstruct a novel element […]

Urbanization is one of the most drastic forms of land-use change, and its negative consequences on biodiversity have been studied extensively in temperate countries such as Germany. However, less research has been conducted in tropical regions from the Global South, where most of the ongoing and future urbanization hotspots are located, and little is known about its effects on agricultural biodiversity and associated ecosystems. A research team from the University of Göttingen and the […]

A team of researchers from the U.K., Australia and France has used genetic barcoding to determine the tree favored by groups of New Caledonian crows to make their tools. They published their results in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.