New Scientist

Tiny male anglerfish fuse their bodies into the larger females, and this strange strategy may have helped the fish diversify widely in the deep sea

The abundance of wild birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles and insects has drastically declined over the past 50 years, but the scale and seriousness of this loss is often lost when we focus on the number of species in an area

Officials set up almost 2000 camera traps covering 120,000 square kilometres to estimate the number of snow leopards in India’s mountainous regions

Not only can parrots fly and walk, they can also swing along branches using their beaks, in a technique researchers are calling beakiation

DNA analysis of spider webs from two locations in Australia identified dozens of vertebrate species, suggesting a new approach to wildlife monitoring

Calls made by male orangutans to attract females have short sequences nested inside longer sequences – a feature called recursion that was thought to be unique to human language

A previously unknown type of replicating agent named "obelisks” has been found in genomic data from stool samples – but we know little about what these entities do

Drone footage filmed off the coast of California shows a 1.5-metre-long, entirely white great white shark pup, probably just hours old – something that has never been seen before

Experiments with a robotic dinosaur suggest feathers may have evolved to startle prey into fleeing from hiding places, a strategy used by some modern birds

Antechinus males only live for one breeding season, so they give up 3 hours of sleep a night during this short period before dying of exhaustion

Owls are famously good at rotating their heads, but now anatomical findings suggest they really could go a full 360 degrees without injuring themselves

Three fossils of Pachycormus fish from the dinosaur era feature smaller members of the same species in their guts - perhaps showing how the animals got by when food was scarce

Fungi exposed to acoustic stimulation in lab experiments have faster growth rates, suggesting a possible way to speed up composting and restore habitats

Satellite images have helped to locate four previously unknown colonies of emperor penguins in the Antarctic. One of the colonies has over 5000 members

Growing up at a different temperature seems to transform common prey bacteria into predators, suggesting that bacterial ecology is more fluid than we thought

A camera can recreate how animals see the world through both visible and ultraviolet light

A raindrop can weigh 40 times as much as a water strider. So how does the insect deal with rain when getting hit with a droplet is equivalent to a car crashing into a human?

Chemical analysis of rocks found in South Africa shows that ancient microorganisms sustained themselves in a variety of ways, adding to evidence for an early origin of life on Earth

We have no complete skeleton of the ancient megalodon shark, but new evidence points to it being more long and slender than previous depictions, say researchers

For primates, being born with a missing limb or experiencing a major injury isn’t necessarily disabling if their environment or social connections help them thrive – just like humans