The wonders of the living world – and of the past world

A perfectly preserved, mummified bear found entombed in the Siberian permafrost in 2020 isn’t what scientists thought it was, a new analysis reveals.

It turns out that the eerily intact carcass is much younger than first assumed and belongs to an entirely different species.

Archaeologists accidentally discovered the world’s earliest horseback riders while studying skeletons found beneath 5,000-year-old burial mounds in Europe and Asia, a new study finds.

The ancient riders were part of the Yamnaya culture, groups of semi-nomadic people who swept across Europe and western Asia, bringing the precursor to the Indo-European language family with them.

The largest animal ever to walk on Earth was likely the dinosaur Argentinosaurus, a hulking 77-ton (70 metric tons) titanosaur that lived about 90 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous. For comparison, the heaviest animal on land today is the African elephant (Loxodonta), which weighs less than 7 tons (6 metric tons). And both look positively dainty next to the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus), which, at an average of 165 tons (150 metric tons), may be the heaviest animal ever to have lived.

But could any animal ever top that? Is there a limit to how large an animal can get?

A newly discovered comet may appear as bright as a star in the night sky by fall 2024.

The comet, known as C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS), was first noted by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope project in South Africa on Feb. 22.

A mysterious object that has been slowly drifting toward the center of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole could be the exploded remnants of two colliding stars, a new study suggests.

The strange blob, named X7, has a mass of around 50 Earths and is moving at speeds of up to 700 miles per second (1,127km/s) as it spirals into our galaxy’s central black hole, getting yanked and stretched by powerful tidal forces as it falls.

Researchers aboard a whale watching boat in Iceland were baffled in 2021 when they saw a female orca swimming alongside a very unusual calf.

The tiny animal didn’t have a white spot near its eye like orcas (Orcinus orca) do and, as it turned out, wasn’t even from the same species.

The remains of a missing person in Argentina were recently recovered from the belly of a dead shark. The shark had been caught by fishers near where the man went missing, leading to speculation in the media that the shark may have killed him.

But shark experts and police suspect that the man was already dead before the shark ate him.