Perfectly Awesome

The entire world’s population of Przewalski’s horses once dwindled to a mere dozen. So how did a pair named Fiona and Shrek end up in livestock auctions in the West?

Rats are less pestilent and more lovable than we think. Can we learn to live with them?

A conservation N.G.O. infiltrates wildlife-trafficking rings to bring them down.

Ocean creatures soak up huge amounts of humanity’s carbon mess. Should we value them like financial assets?

In the woods near her home, Lucy Jones discovers the magic of slime molds and becomes entangled in their fluid, nonbinary way of being.

Language lessons with an extraordinary ape.

What can elephants, birds, and flamenco players teach a neuroscientist-composer about music?

Pets left behind when people fled the disaster in 1986 seem to have seeded a unique population.

A woman, an elephant, andan uncommon love story spanningnearly half a century.

The story of Lacey, and why I had to kill her.

Catapult publishes literary fiction and artful narrative nonfiction that engages with our Perception Box, the powerful metaphor we use to define the structure and boundaries of how we see others in th

Advanced technologies like A.I. are enabling scientists to learn that the world is full of intelligent creatures with sophisticated languages, like honeybees. What might they tell us?

Master falconer Alina Blankenship and her mélange of raptors have become the protectors of some of Oregon's top vineyards.

Behold choanoflagellates, tiny creatures that can be one body and many bodies all at once.

People say farmers aren’t supposed to get emotionally attached to livestock. Uh-huh. When fate sent our writer two newborn sheep with life-threatening birth defects, that kind of thinking was banished from the barn.

To save endangered eels, researchers have been working for decades to figure out where they reproduce.

In the Panhandle, where swarms of lionfish gobble up native species, a tournament offers cash prizes to divers skilled at spearing one predator after another.

Scientists are using machine learning to eavesdrop on naked mole rats, fruit bats, crows and whales — and to communicate back.

Meet the footballing bees, optimistic pigs and alien-like octopuses that are shaking up how we think about minds.

Oceans also have their vigilantes.

Famed American biologist Patricia Wright explores an astonishing breadth of biodiversity in the wilderness of Madagascar

They’ve roamed free for hundreds of years, but is that freedom harming the ecosystem they call home?

Hidden in the tusk of a 34-year-old mastodon was a record of time and space that helped explain his violent death.

Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science

In his new book, An Immense World, science writer Ed Yong explores the diversity of perception in the animal world — including echolocation, magnetic fields and ultraviolet vision.

Meet the footballing bees, optimistic pigs and alien-like octopuses that are shaking up how we think about minds

Every creature lives within its own sensory bubble, but only humans have the capacity to appreciate the experiences of other species. What we’ve learned is astounding.

Three sisters braved lions, crocodiles, poachers, raging rivers and other dangers on a 1,300-mile transnational effort to forge a new dynasty.

What happens when we talk to animals?

In December 1997, a tiger prowled the outskirts of a small town in Russia's Far East. In his book The Tiger, John Vaillant re-creates the events of that terrifying winter in an environment where man and tiger live side-by-side.

You might consider them flying rats, but their odysseys stump scientists

An ambitious project is attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with artificial intelligence, then talk back to them.

Conservationists saw the 6-year-old brown bear as a symbol of hope. Villagers saw him as a menace. Then he turned up dead.

Your obnoxious neighbor or just a misunderstood, displaced seabird?

Zito Madu in pursuit of London’s wildlife.

The long read: Dumba has spent her life performing in circuses around Europe, but in recent years animal rights activists have been campaigning to rescue her. When it looked like they might succeed, Dumba and her owners disappeared

Deer can regrow their antlers, and humans can replace their liver. What else might be possible?

While captive in a Navy program, a beluga whale named Noc began to mimic human speech. What was behind his attempt to talk to us?

Artificial intelligence may help us decode animalese. But how much will we really be able to understand?

Millions suffered through terror and upheaval in the turbulent years following the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. One of them was a baby elephant from India — A new story from India to the world, each week on FiftyTwo.in

The descendants of pets abandoned by those fleeing the Chernobyl disaster are now striking up a curious relationship with humans charged with guarding the contaminated area.

The microscopic animals can withstand extreme conditions that would kill humans, and may one day help in the development of Covid vaccines. How do they do it?

As a reptile-obsessed teen, I ran away to hunt lizards in the Everglades, then hatched a plan to milk venom from deadly snakes. It went even more comically wrong than you're thinking.

Birds do it. Bees do it. Learning about the astounding navigational feats of wild creatures can teach us a lot about where we’re going.

Nearly a century after the last wolf was eradicated in the state, a lone female arrived and established a pack. Not everyone is cheering

In Alaska, one of the longest-running and most comprehensive seabird monitoring projects is equal parts tedium, adventure, truth, and beauty.

What will we lose when Najin and Fatu die?

The giant squid has taken on a near-mythical status for generations of sailors, explorers, and writers. How could something so big remain unseen—or be less understood than dinosaurs?

It’s dangerous to blame the decline of one species on a single predator. We humans like to do it anyway.

The book Honeybee Democracy, published in 2010, has been sitting on my shelf for many years.

Despite their wacky brains, these intelligent animals seem to respond to the drug in a very similar way to humans.

They’re tiny and they hover, and they’re one of only three groups of birds that are vocal learners. They sing with their mouths andtheir feathers. No wonder UC Riverside researcher Chris Clark is obsessed with hummingbirds.

He was the alpha male of the first pack to live in Oregon since 1947. For years, a state biologist tracked him, collared him, counted his pups, weighed him, photographed him, and protected him. But then the animal known as OR4 broke one too many rules.

My father always pampered his pets. So when he fell ill and moved in with us, it was no surprise that his corgi came to rule our home. What I didn’t expect was for Trilby to care for me after Dad was gone.

"She's missing. I’m not going to quit her."

Self-replicating, bacterial life first appeared on Earth about 4 billion years ago. For most of Earth’s history, life remained at the single-celled level, and nothing like a nervous system existed …

In an era of climate change, everything feels strange. Even the places we call home.

Wild mustang populations are out of control, competing with cattle and native wildlife for resources. If the federal government doesn’t rein them in, ranchers may take matters into their own hands.

Go behind the scenes at the South Carolina Aquarium's Sea Turtle Care Center during a nearly yearlong journey to get a massive injured loggerhead back home

A tour of a graveyard for beloved animals.

Technology can displace the cow and save the climate. But we will need to think beyond the bun

Kathi Lynn Austin is on a global chase to stop the flow of guns threatening to wipe the rhinoceros off the face of the Earth.

Human hunters moved north into what would become Montana on the heels of the receding ice, coming into the Mission Valley when the land was yet raw and studded with erratics. Only the first scrim o…

The female brown Aspin was found drifting in the Gulf of Thailand on Friday. It is unknown whether the dog swam the astonishing distance from the shore, or jumped off a boat at sea.

When foxes nearly wiped out a colony of little penguins, a sheepdog saved the day.

When a massive Caribbean volcano erupts, the island’s residents flee, leaving their beloved animals behind. As pets and livestock are…

I brought a seasoned veteran of the conflict in Afghanistan into my home—and then things got wild

Attacks by elephants on villages, people and other animals are on the rise. Some researchers are pointing to a species-wide trauma and the fraying of the fabric of pachyderm society.

They worm into snails and infect the brains of fish. They’ve also found their way into Kevin Lafferty’s heart. He sees them as beautiful examples of sophisticated evolution, and as keys to ecosystem balance.

Behold the marvel of the animal’s fabrication.

Elephants might have the necessary capacities for personhood – we just need to help them acquire the cognitive scaffolding

Without a good shoeing, a horse can indeed be lost. Enter the farrier.

Multimillion-dollar sales of songbirds heap pressure on species already in decline. We go inside the covert investigation to capture traffickers.

A quest for tigers in India.

A new book from Christopher Skaife is a beguiling, fascinating, and highly amusing account of the strangely magical birds.

Can we use the tools of psychology to understand how colonies of social insects make decisions?

The long read: Abandoned as a child, Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja survived alone in the wild for 15 years. But living with people proved to be even more difficult

A profile of a pig.

Glory, grief, and the race for the Triple Crown.

Rob Wielgus was one of America’s pre-eminent experts on large carnivores. Then he ran afoul of the enemies of the wolf.

Fishing gear can pose a deadly threat to whales—and to those who try to save them.