Nature
For more than a century, a small piece of dinosaur skull sat in a drawer at London’s Natural History Museum, apparently attracting little attention.…
6 min read
Nature
The first time you see the northern lights (aurora borealis), the instinct is to look for a source. Something must be projecting this, surely.…
5 min read
Nature
Extinction sounds wonderfully final. A species lives, struggles, loses and disappears. Scientists eventually place it in the biological filing cabinet marked “gone”, museums label…
6 min read
Nature
There is a comfortable psychological arrangement between humans and insects. We are large; they are small. They occupy cracks, leaves and inconvenient corners of…
6 min read
Nature
Armadillos wander through the natural world like quirky little mistakes that nature fully intended. They look part medieval armoury, part garden pest, part misunderstood…
9 min read
Nature
Extinction usually sounds rather final. A species disappears, scientists search for it, nobody finds it, and eventually someone reaches for the biological equivalent of…
6 min read
Nature
Romance among emus begins with a rather important reversal of expectations. The female does much of the pursuing, she competes for access to desirable…
7 min read
Nature
Madagascar has never shown much interest in producing ordinary wildlife. It gave the world lemurs that dance sideways, primates with skeletal fingers, carnivores resembling…
6 min read
Nature
A lemur can look like a monkey, move like a cat, stare like an insomniac and scream like something being murdered behind a hotel…
6 min read
Nature
Madagascar looks like evolution received an island, several million years and absolutely no adult supervision. Lemurs sing across rainforests, chameleons shrink to the size…
6 min read
