Yala National Park, Sri Lanka – Renowned for harboring one of the world’s highest leopard densities, the southern park welcomed more than 380,000 visitors from January to June 2025, generating over $5 million in revenue. This economic boon, however, has fueled persistent overcrowding in Block I, where safari jeeps often speed through narrow roads and ...
Kibale National Park, Uganda – A once-unified community of nearly 200 chimpanzees in the remote Ngogo forest underwent a rare permanent split around 2015, igniting years of lethal violence among former allies. Researchers, drawing on three decades of observations, documented the division of the world’s largest known wild chimpanzee group into Central and Western factions. ...
U.S.-Mexico border, Texas — Researchers recently uncovered evidence that mountain lions navigate the 30-foot-high border wall via improvised openings no larger than a sheet of paper. These so-called “kitty doors” provide a narrow pathway for the big cats, preserving links between populations on both sides of the divide. Wildlife experts monitoring the situation, however, warn ...
New Orleans – A coalition of environmental organizations has filed a federal lawsuit challenging a rare and sweeping decision by the Endangered Species Committee, known as the “God Squad,” to exempt oil and gas operations across the Gulf of Mexico from key wildlife protections. The move, made in late March, has ignited concerns for critically ...
Kyoto, Japan – Researchers at Kyoto University’s Center for the Evolutionary Origins of Human Behavior witnessed an extraordinary display when a resident chimpanzee began transforming ordinary floorboards into percussion instruments. Ayumu, a 26-year-old male and alpha of his group, repeatedly pried loose planks from his enclosure’s walkway and launched into structured drumming routines accompanied by ...
Minya, Egypt – A joint Egyptian-Spanish archaeological mission recently unearthed a Roman-era tomb at Al-Bahnasa, the site of the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus. This discovery illuminates funerary customs from the Greco-Roman period, blending Egyptian traditions with classical influences. Excavators revealed mummies adorned with golden amulets and a papyrus fragment from Homer’s Iliad, alongside unusual cremated ...
You have probably grown up with two competing images of dinosaurs in your head: the slow, lumbering, cold-blooded swamp beasts of old textbooks, and the sleek, agile, bird‑like predators you see in modern documentaries. Over the last few decades, fossil discoveries have quietly been rewriting that picture, and the latest evidence tilts things even more ...
You tend to assume that without computers, steel cranes, and laser levels, people in the distant past were stuck with trial and error. Then you stand in front of a pyramid, an aqueduct, or a megalithic stone that weighs as much as a small jet, and you realize something humbling: they knew exactly what they ...
You probably grew up seeing mammoths in books and movies as shaggy, oversized elephants trudging through blizzards. But when you start digging into what scientists have actually discovered, mammoths turn out to be far stranger, more fragile, and more familiar than you might expect. Their story is really a mirror held up to your own ...
You live on a planet that has been endlessly reshaping itself for billions of years, but most days you only notice the potholes. Every so often, though, you stumble into a landscape so strange, so dramatic, that you can almost hear the planet talking. In the United States, a handful of places do this especially ...
