It takes a gutsy insect to sneak up on a huge dinosaur while it sleeps, crawl onto its soft underbelly and give it a bite that might have felt like a needle going in – but giant "flea-like" animals, possibly the oldest of their type ever discovered, probably did just that.

Conservationists with the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have found that larger male gorillas living in the rainforests of Congo seem to be more successful than smaller ones at attracting mates and even raising young.

Despite years of intensive research about the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs about 65.5 million years ago, a fundamental question remains: were dinosaurs already undergoing a long-term decline before an asteroid hit at the end of the Cretaceous? A study led by scientists at the American Museum of Natural History gives a multifaceted answer.

New research in the journal Physiological and Biochemical Zoology shows why bigger isn't always better when it comes to sprinting speed.

Evidence that a Florentine merchant house financed the earliest English voyages to North America, has been published on-line in the academic journal Historical Research.

Claudia Bieber from the Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology (FIWI) of the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, and fellow scientists analysed a capture-recapture data set on common dormice (Muscardinus avellanarius) to investigate the life-history strategy of this species. These small rodents are about the size and weight of a wood mouse (Apodemus sylvaticus), but, unlike th

From an anatomical point of view, a normal, non-pathological eye is known as an emmetropic eye, and has been studied very little until now in comparison with myopic and hypermetropic eyes. The results show that healthy emmetropic women have a wider pupil diameter than men.

ICP researchers published today in the 'Proceedings of the Royal Society B' one of the first fossil-based evidences supporting the evolutionary theory of ageing, which predicts that species evolving in low mortality and resource-limited ecosystems tend to be more long-lived. The study shows that the tooth height of endemic insular mammals is an indicator of longevity, and questions the

Here's an anatomical packing list for making that historic trip from water to land circa 370 million years ago: Lungs? Check. Legs? Check. Patches of highly vascular bone in the skin? In a new paper, scientists propose why many of the earliest four-legged creatures that dared breathe on land carried bony skin features.

Humans that populated the banks of the river Manzanares (Madrid, Spain) during the Middle Palaeolithic (between 127,000 and 40,000 years ago) fed themselves on pachyderm meat and bone marrow. This is what a Spanish study shows and has found percussion and cut marks on elephant remains in the site of Preresa (Madrid).