It may be the closest scientists have yet come to creating Frankenstein’s monster. Living pieces of dozens of individual animals known as comb jellies have been fused together to create an array of new forms that, in some cases, survived for more than a week.
These chimeric animals are more than just physically connected bits of different individuals, says Leonid Moroz at the University of Florida. Their nervous systems also fuse together, creating entities that heand his colleague Tigran Norekian, also at the University of Florida, call…
An orca carrying a salmon in its mouth in south-east Alaska
Minden Pictures/Alamy
Some of the orcas off North America’s west coast have taken to wearing dead salmon on their heads, resurrecting a curious trend that was first reported in the 1980s.
Local photographers noticed the salmon-wearing orcas last month – and so did researchers. Deborah Giles, science and research director for the non-profit organisation Wild Orca, was observing the marine mammals in South Puget Sound in south-west Washington a few weeks ago. “We saw one with a fish on its head,” she says. “So that was fun –…
Wild chimpanzees appear to learn skills from each other and then – much as humans do – improve on those techniques from one generation to the next.
In particular, young females that migrate between groups bring their cultural knowledge with them, and groups can combine new techniques with existing ones to get better at foraging for food. Such “cumulative culture” means some chimpanzee communities are becoming more technologically advanced over time – albeit very slowly, says Andrew Whiten at the University of St Andrews, UK.
“If chimpanzees have some cultural knowledge that the community they’re moving into doesn’t have, they may pass it on – just in the same way they’re passing the genes on,” he says. “And then that culture builds up from there.”
Scientists already knew that chimpanzees were capable of using tools in sophisticated ways and passing on that knowledge to their offspring. But in comparison with the rapid technological development of humans, it seemed that chimpanzees weren’t improving on previous innovations, says Whiten. The fact that chimpanzee tools are often made from biodegrading plants makes it difficult for scientists to track their cultural evolution.
Cassandra Gunasekaram at the University of Zurich in Switzerland suspected she might be able to apply genetic analysis to the puzzle. While male chimpanzees stay in their home area, young females leave their native communities to find mates elsewhere. She wondered if those females have brought their skill sets with them into their new groups.
To find out, she and her colleagues acquired data on 240 chimpanzees representing all four subspecies, which were previously collected by other research groups at 35 study sites in Africa. The data included precise information about what tools, if any, each of the animals used, and their genetic connections over the past 15,000 years. “The genetics give us a kind of time machine into the way culture has been transmitted across chimpanzees in the past,” says Whiten. “It’s quite a revelation that we can have these new insights.”
Some chimpanzees used complex combinations of tools, for example a drilling stick and a fishing brush fashioned by pulling a plant stem between their teeth, for hunting termites. The researchers found that the chimpanzees with the most advanced tool sets were three to five times more likely to share the same DNA than those that used simple tools or no tools at all, even though they might live thousands of kilometres away. And advanced tool use was also more strongly associated with female migration compared with simple or no tool use.
“Our interpretation is that these complex tool sets are really invented by perhaps building on a simpler form from before, and therefore they have to depend on transmission by females from the communities that invented them initially to all the other communities along the way,” says Whiten.
“It shows that complex tools would rely on social exchanges across groups – which is very surprising and exciting,” says Gunasekaram.
Thibaud Gruber at the University of Geneva isn’t surprised by the results, but says the definition of complex behaviour is debatable. “After working with chimps for 20 years, I would argue that stick use itself is complex,” he says.
His own team, for example, found what they called cumulative culture in chimpanzees that make sponges out of moss instead of leaves – which is no more complex, but works more efficiently to soak up mineral-rich water from clay pits. “It’s not a question of being more complex, but of just having a technique that builds on a previously established one,” he says.
Cumulative culture is still markedly slower in chimpanzees compared with humans, probably due to their different cognitive abilities and lack of speech, says Gunasekaram. Also, chimpanzees interact far less with others outside their communities compared with humans, giving them fewer opportunities to share culture.
An Ethiopian wolf licks nectar from the Ethiopian red hot poker flower
Adrien Lesaffre
Ethiopian wolves feed on the sweet nectar of a local flower, and may be the first carnivores discovered to act as pollinators.
The Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis) is the rarest wild canid species in the world and Africa’s most threatened carnivore. Endemic to the Ethiopian Highlands, fewer than 500 individuals survive.
Sandra Lai at the University of Oxford and her colleagues observed Ethiopian wolves lapping up the nectar of Ethiopian red hot poker (Kniphofia…
Southern giant hornets, a species native to Asia, have been sighted in Europe for the first time, raising concerns about their potential impact on native insects.
Between 2022 and 2023, Omar Sánchez Fernández at the University of Oviedo, Spain, and his colleagues accidentally caught four giant hornets in wasp traps in Asturias, northern Spain.
A genetic analysis revealed that the four female workers they captured were southern giant hornets (Vespa soror).
We crafted our first rodent car from a plastic cereal container. After trial and error, my colleagues and I found that rats could learn to drive forward by grasping a small wire that acted like a gas pedal. Before long, they were steering with surprising precision to reach a Froot Loop treat.
As expected, rats housed in enriched environments—complete with toys, space, and companions—learned to drive faster than those in standard cages. This finding supported the idea that complex environments enhance neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to change across the lifespan in response to environmental demands.
After we published our research, the story of driving rats went viralin the media. The project continues in my lab with new, improved rat-operated vehicles, or ROVs, designed by robotics professor John McManus and his students. These upgraded electrical ROVs—featuring ratproof wiring, indestructible tires, and ergonomic driving levers—are akin to a rodent version of Tesla’s Cybertruck.
As a neuroscientistwho advocates for housing and testing laboratory animals in natural habitats, I’ve found it amusing to see how far we’ve strayed from my lab practices with this project. Rats typically prefer dirt, sticks, and rocks over plastic objects. Now, we had them driving cars.
But humans didn’t evolve to drive either. Although our ancient ancestors didn’t have cars, they had flexible brains that enabled them to acquire new skills—fire, language, stone tools, and agriculture. And some time after the invention of the wheel, humans made cars.
Although cars made for rats are far from anything they would encounter in the wild, we believed that driving represented an interesting way to study how rodents acquire new skills. Unexpectedly, we found that the rats had an intense motivation for their driving training, often jumping into the car and revving the “lever engine” before their vehicle hit the road. Why was that?
The New Destination of Joy
Concepts from introductory psychology textbooks took on a new, hands-on dimension in our rodent driving laboratory. Building on foundational learning approaches such as operant conditioning, which reinforces targeted behavior through strategic incentives, we trained the rats step-by-step in their driver’s ed programs.
Initially, they learned basic movements, such as climbing into the car and pressing a lever. But with practice, these simple actions evolved into more complex behaviors, such as steering the car toward a specific destination.
Evidence that animals mourn the death of loved ones is growing, but we should be wary of letting our biases cloud this topic, says philosopher Susana Monsó
The skeleton of Navaornis hestiae, an 80-million-year-old bird fossil
S. Abramowicz/Dinosaur Institute/Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
An 80-million-year-old fossil bird has been discovered with a skull so exquisitely preserved that scientists have been able to study the detailed structure of its brain.
In both age and evolutionary development, the new species, named Navaornis hestiae, is almost midway between the earliest known bird-like dinosaur, Archaeopteryx, which lived 150 million years ago, and modern birds. It lived in the Cretaceous Period alongside dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops.
The fossil, which bears a superficial resemblance to a pigeon, was found near Presidente Prudente, Brazil, in 2016 and was immediately recognised as significant because of the rarity of a full bird skeleton, particularly one of that age.
But Daniel Field at the University of Cambridge says it wasn’t until 2022 that he and his colleagues realised the skull was so intact that they could possibly scan it and create a 3D model of its brain.
High-resolution CT scanning allows palaeontologists to peer inside fossils. “This involves careful ‘digital dissection’: separating out each individual component of the skull and then reassembling them into a complete, undeformed three-dimensional reconstruction,” says Field.
“The new fossil provides unprecedented insight into the pattern and timing by which the specialised features of the brain of living birds evolved.”
Based on the team’s reconstruction of the brain, Field says the cognitive abilities and flying capacity of Navaornis were probably inferior to those of most living birds.
Artist’s impression of Navaornis hestiae
J. d’Oliveira
The portions of the brain responsible for complex cognition and spatial orientation aren’t as enlarged as those of modern birds, he says.
“Although the cerebrum of Navaornis is greatly expanded relative to the condition in a more archaic bird relative like Archaeopteryx, it is not as expanded as what we see in living birds.”
The enlarged brains of modern birds support a huge range of complex behaviours, says Field, but understanding how their brains evolved has been challenging due to a lack of adequately complete and well-preserved fossil bird skulls from early bird relatives.
“Navaornis fills a roughly 70-million-year-long gap in our understanding of how the distinctive brains of modern birds evolved.”
