The recurring problem is the same everywhere: sleep appears to be necessary, and being asleep is dangerous. Almost every solution below is a compromise between those two facts. Here are…
Animal navigation combines several systems at once, which is why removing one rarely stops an animal entirely. Here are seventeen of the tools involved.
1. Reading the Earth's Magnetic Field…
There are a small number of biological rules that hold across every vertebrate: a spine, a heart, and haemoglobin to move oxygen around the body.
The last one has exactly…
The honeycomb is probably the most cited example of mathematics in nature. Rows of near-identical hexagonal cells, walls meeting at consistent angles, packed with no wasted space — and produced…
Fingerprints feel like a distinctly primate thing, and mostly they are. Humans have them, as do chimpanzees, orangutans and other primates, which makes sense given how recently we shared an…
The flamingo is one of the few animals recognizable from colour alone. The name itself comes from a Spanish or Portuguese word meaning flame-coloured, and the birds are so associated…