A long-necked sea predator from China described in Science
...blished by AAAS the nonprofit science society. The creature is the first report of a fully marine member of a ...d elongated neck vertebrae. Comparison of this new creature to the famous long-necked reptiles and a fellow protorosaur from Europe and the Middle East called T...Students build submarine to track Octopuses
... about the Giant Pacific Octopus, but this elusive creature doesn't willingly reveal its secrets. Divers can follow the octopus for short periods, but what's really needed is an undersea robot that will wait patiently outside the creature's den, ready to shadow its every move. UA engineering undergrads, in co...Popular Science announces Third Annual 'Brilliant 10'
...thod for observing a single brain cell in a living creature over time. By creating a microscope powerful enough to image a synapse--one-billionth the size of a grain of rice--he witnessed mouse neurons sprouting new branches in response to unfamiliar tasks, and saw new synapses appear. Svoboda's work contradi...Identifying tick genes could halt disease, bioterrorism threat
...ways to halt tick-borne illnesses. An invertebrate creature known as an arthropod, ticks transmit, or vector, more pathogens to humans and other animals than any other blood-feeding organism. Indeed, experts now believe one tick type in the United States transmits West Nile virus, previously believed to be on...Why some animals have smaller eyes: Lifestyle matters
... the weight of an animal out of water. One aquatic creature that fails to obey the bigger body-bigger eyes rule is the reedfish, a lanky, well-camouflaged fish with no apparent head and little room for eyes. The Cornell biologists introduced their Vision Research report with a brief comment on perception a...Computer imaging of Archeopteryx skull suggests this dinosaur-bird link could fly
...rred in life. The repositioning suggested that the creature had a brain about three times larger than crocodiles and other modern reptiles, and of a similar size to many modern birds. "There are living birds that have brains that are relatively smaller than Archeopteryx ," Rowe said. Birds are thought to nee...Scientists describe the world's smallest, lightest fish
...t time. They spent roughly six months studying the creature but instantly recognized it as something special. "It was a really good day when I first looked under the microscope and recognized something that I knew was a new species. I said to myself, 'Wow, this is really great,'" said Walker, a senior museum ...Rare, tiny find in West Australian waters
A miniscule marine creature caught during a recent Indian Ocean research voyage is believed to be the first of its kind identified in the Southern Hemisphere. The single celled organism, supporting what looks like 6 legs is a phaeodaria from the family coelodendridae, also know...Mite transmits viruses damaging to wheat
...mite, the pathologist said. The tiny eight-legged creature is white and cigar-shaped. It belongs to a group of microscopic plant-feeding pests, of the order, Acarina. The mite crawls slowly and depends almost entirely on wind for movement. Mature wheat is no longer suitable as a food source, so the mite st...Mantis shrimp may have swiftest kick in the animal kingdom
...ast year that these animals are the only known sea creature to use fluorescence to signal one another. The creatures also have the most sophisticated eyes of any animal on Earth. Some species have more than 10 pigments sensitive to different wavelengths of light, compared to only three pigments in humans. And...UF researcher: Animals think in their own way, but unlike humans
...logy Professor Clive Wynne, who writes about these creature features and others in a new 244-page book, "Do Animals Think?" being published this month by Princeton University Press. While animals can do many clever things and even reason, they don't have the ability to reflect on what they are doing, one ......l about tadpoles. The mere mention of this little creature sparks happy memories of children screaming with delight as they splash in a shallow stream trying to capture some of the tiny swimmers in a cup. The real magic happens as the children witness the metamorphosis from tadpole to frog. Within the mys...'Mad cow' mechanism may be integral to storing memory
...acted the CPEB protein from a sea slug. This lowly creature has achieved high status in neurobiology because its neurons are so big, they can be manipulated and turned into unusually powerful investigative tools. The researchers fused this CPEB to other proteins that would serve as reporters of activity, and ...Expedition will retrace legendary Steinbeck-Ricketts voyage to the Sea of Cortez
...d learn to appreciate the animal as an intelligent creature with remarkable attributes." Our fear and fascination with giant sea creatures is nothing new, of course. As Steinbeck and Ricketts observed 63 years ago in the Sea of Cortez: "Men really need sea monsters in their personal oceans." Gilly, Baxter a...Mantis shrimp fluoresce to enhance signaling in the dim ocean depths
...ntis shrimp has the most sophisticated eyes of any creature on the planet, yet it often lives at murky depths where the only light is a filtered, dim blue. Why does it need such complex vision? Marine biologists and physiologists have now discovered at least one use for these eyes in the deep, blue ocean: to ...Specialized brain helped ancient reptiles fly and hunt
...o in what is now Germany, and Anhanguera, a larger creature with a 14-foot wingspan and a 20-inch skull that lived 115 million years ago in what is now Brazil. Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and Jonathan Franzosa and Timothy Rowe of the University of Texas ran the skulls through a high-resolution ...Startling deep-sea encounter with rare, massive Greenland shark
...ea with a rare Greenland shark. The docile 15-foot creature gently rammed into the submersible's clear front sphere before turning and swimming slowly away. The entire encounter was captured on video, a clip of which can be viewed by clicking under the shark's photo at: http://www.at-sea.org/missions/maineev...Built-in eyeshade offers clue to prehistoric past
A new, rare fossil of a prehistoric sea creature bearing eyes like "twin towers" sheds light on how it lived more than 395 million years ago, says a University of Alberta researcher. Dr. Brian Chatterton, one of the world's leading experts on trilobites and a professor in the U of A's Faculty of Sc...New marine protected area to safeguard world's largest fish
...Cubera snapper. But perhaps the most awe-inspiring creature in the entire region is the whale shark. The large whale sharks can live to 100 years, grow to 50 feet and weigh as much as 27,000 pounds. Although found in tropical seas throughout the world, its spawning congregations are notoriously unpredictable.......Eastern scorpion to inhibit an exotic, lower order creature that resides in a Japanese ocean thermal vent. This implies that voltage-dependent potassium channels are extremely similar throughout every branch of the evolutionary tree." A colleague of MacKinnon, Rockefeller Professor David Gadsby, who heads a s...