New Scientist

A set of large, distinctive footprints suggest a raptor dinosaur that lived in East Asia 96 million years ago grew to a length of 5 metres

Six full-body fossils of Ptychodus sharks have been formally analysed for the first time, revealing that they were fast swimmers that preyed on shelled creatures

A group of around 40 scientists signed a declaration calling for formal acknowledgement of consciousness in a range of animals, including insects and fish – but the evidence is still lacking

An Australian bull ant is the first animal known to use the patterns produced by polarised moonlight to navigate its environment

By measuring how birds’ vocal muscles move while they are asleep and using a physical model for how those muscles produce sound, researchers have pulled songs from the minds of sleeping birds

The vertebrae of Vasuki indicus, a snake that lived 47 million years ago, suggest it could have been as long as 15 metres

The jawbone of an ichthyosaur uncovered in south-west England has been identified as a new species, and researchers estimate that the whole animal was 20 to 25 metres long

Weeding robots can sometimes struggle to tell weeds from crops, but genetically modifying the plants we want to keep to make them brightly coloured would make the job easier, suggest a group of researchers

Up to 17 US states could be peppered with more than a trillion cicadas this spring, and though it has been a while since these two specific broods emerged at once, double broods are not that rare

We know little about how embryonic development in animals evolved from single-celled ancestors, but simple organisms with a multicellular life stage offer intriguing clues

A serendipitous lab accident revealed that hibernating bumblebee queens can make it through days of flooding, revealing that they are less vulnerable to extreme weather than previously thought

Starfish feet are coordinated purely through mechanical loading, enabling the animals to bounce rhythmically along the seabed without a central nervous system

One species of nematode worm turns into a kin-devouring nightmare if it grows up in a crowded environment with a poor diet

Conservationists think tweaking pandas’ diets might shift their gut microbiomes in a way that could encourage them to mate

The hatching of the 250th California condor chick at the San Diego Zoo marks a notable milestone for a species that narrowly evaded extinction

Bonobos have long been regarded as the peaceful ape, in sharp contrast with violent chimpanzees, but a study based on thousands of hours of observations suggests the real story is more nuanced

A once-independent bacterium has evolved into an organelle that provides nitrogen to algal cells – an event so rare that there are only three other known cases

Since 2012, Mary Jo Hoffman has taken one snap a day of the natural objects around her. She explains what lies behind two of them - and what the "art of noticing" has brought to her life

An enzyme in a cyanobacterium can take the unusual form a triangle containing ever-smaller triangular gaps, making a fractal pattern

We have enough genetic material to bring back the northern white rhino, but doing so won’t be easy