Found in the Amazon, Pantanal, and Atlantic Forest, they were distinguished from what was previously known as a single species by integrating morphological analyses, molecular data, and interactions with host plants.

Threatened plant species could be conserved by planting them "inter situ" - in wild environments outside their current geographic range - per Amazon rainforest case study

A newly discovered fossil site in Egypt is reshaping scientists’ understanding of how marine ecosystems recovered after the asteroid impact that ended the Age of Dinosaurs. In a study published in Science Advances, researchers report that compositionally modern marine fish communities were already established just 4 million years after the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.

The site, known as Qreiya 3 and dated to 62.2 million years ago, preserves an exceptionally diverse offshore marine ecosystem from the early Paleocene. Hundreds of fossil fishes recovered from the site include more than 20 groups of ray-finned fishes, making it the richest and most diverse Danian fish assemblage yet discovered.

The fossils reveal that many fish groups common in today’s oceans—including early relatives of tunas, mackerels, jacks, moonfishes, and pipefishes—had already diversified shortly after the extinction event that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs. At the same time, several predatory fish groups dominant in Cretaceous seas are notably absent, suggesting a rapid ecological turnover in marine ecosystems.

Led by researchers from the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center in collaboration with the University of Michigan and KU Leuven, the study provides some of the clearest fossil evidence yet that modern-style marine fish faunas emerged remarkably quickly after one of Earth’s greatest mass extinctions.

After an asteroid slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, there is very little evidence of fish in the fossil record. Now, a research team including University of Michigan graduate student Sanaa El-Sayed has discovered the earliest known examples of six modern fish groups that still swim in Earth's seas today.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor Christopher Hammell and his team have discovered that proteins MYRF-1 and LIN-42 act as the master developmental clock in C. elegans, scheduling the start time and duration of the worm’s four larval stages. This is the first non-repeating biological clock of its kind ever found.

A new Dartmouth study shows octopuses can use mirrors to find food out of sight, demonstrating spatial cognitive abilities. The results are published in Current Biology.

A new study on multiple genomes from the extinct cave lion has discovered that it represented a highly distinct evolutionary lineage, which separated from modern lions more than a million years ago. The results also show that the cave lion had a history of interbreeding with modern lions that was tightly linked to past climatic changes. These findings are published in the journal Cell in a study led by Swedish and British scientists.

Fossils from 520-million-year-old rocks in China provide the first clear evidence that bryozoans were part of the Cambrian explosion. Bryozoans are tiny, filter-feeding colonial animals common in today’s oceans, but their early history has long been unclear because they did not appear in the fossil record until about 50 million years after most major animal groups. These newly discovered fossils fill that gap, showing that bryozoans emerged during the Cambrian explosion alongside other early animal groups.