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A small town in Romania called Costesti is home to unusual geological manifestations – bulging bulbous boulders called trovants. These stones have long intrigued locals, with their organic-looking shapes and strange cement oozings, inspiring myths about the stones’ ability to grow and move – like living beings rather than inanimate objects. Trovants vary greatly in

Found mostly in the open prairies of North America and some remote regions of Northern Europe, snow doughnuts or snow rollers might look like icy man-made structures, but these tire-shaped curiosities are entirely natural. They’re very rarely seen because the number of weather conditions that need to be just right for them to form –

We’re learning more about earthquake triggers all the time, but there’s also plenty still to find out about how these seismic shifts work. Now, geologists think they’ve identified a key mechanism behind some of the biggest earthquakes on the planet. Megathrust earthquakes happen at subduction zones, where one tectonic plate is being pushed under another.

Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Valviloculus pleristaminis makes for a perfect example. Scientists only recently identified this mysterious, extinct flower. It once bloomed in the Cretaceous period - a floral relic of a bygone age, preserved in time-stopping amber since some nameless day when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth. “This isn’t

Above water, they sound like bellowing Wookies. Below the ice, they sound like chirping, chattering robots. Either way, the Weddell seals of Antarctica should have no trouble finding work in an upcoming Star Wars project. “The Weddell seals’ calls create an almost unbelievable, otherworldly soundscape under the ice,” Paul Cziko, a visiting professor at the University of Oregon

They’re among the most popular and captivating animals in the ocean – a creature that delights at every splash or glimpse. And many are dying. A deadly skin condition, first noted in dolphins near New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, has now been formally identified by scientists. ‘Freshwater skin disease’, as researchers define the

A female wolf pup mummy, perfectly preserved as it remained locked in permafrost for 57,000 years, is finally giving up some of its secrets, including how the grey wolf died and ended up alone in the ice so long ago. The mummified grey wolf (Canis lupus) was discovered by a gold miner excavating permafrost in Yukon, Canada,

In new proof that 2020 has been a crappy year basically everywhere, scientists have captured video evidence of octopuses randomly punching at fish, possibly for no reason other than being spiteful. While this remarkable, rather nasty-sounding behaviour might seem like it comes from a place of direct conflict between different animal species, that’s not the

Geologically speaking, Australia is a relatively quiet place to live. Earthquakes are rare and typically gentle, and as for volcanoes, there hasn’t been as much as a burp of magma on the mainland in thousands of years. It wasn’t always this way. In fact, the land is littered with the remains of mysterious eruptions that

With their long eyelashes, banana-shaped ears, upturned mouths, and stocky bodies covered with curly wool, llamas look like creatures that walked out of a Dr. Seuss story. And now they’re celebrities in the US. Because of their gentle and docile demeanor, llamas are often favorites at petting zoos. They appear at festivals and weddings and

The Movile cave in southeast Romania wouldn’t be top of your holiday destination list: no light gets down to it, the air is thick with poisonous gases, and it was cut off from the outside world for around 5.5 million years before its accidental discovery in 1986. Life does exist in the Movile though, and

With bizarrely ornate feathers and outrageous dances, New Guinea’s birds-of-paradise are glorious living examples of how sexual selection can make animals’ evolution get hilariously whacked. Now we have evidence that such fancy and impractical flamboyance was a thing well before modern birds even evolved. A chicken-sized dinosaur with a dense mane of thick hair-like structures

Supercontinents – giant landmasses made up of multiple continents – could emerge again on Earth 200 million years from now, and where they form on the globe could drastically affect our planet’s climate. Scientists recently modeled this “deep future” view of Earth with a supercontinent makeover, presenting their findings Dec. 8 at the annual meeting

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but a newly discovered orchid isn’t likely to be the top choice for many as a corsage centrepiece. Gastrodia agnicellus, from the forests of Madagascar, has been given the label of the world’s ugliest orchid by botanists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in the UK.