Most humans might be right-handed, but plenty of other animals have a preferred hand (or whatever they've got instead of hands) too. The more general term is lateralization, and it's found in everything from kangaroos to octopuses.

Humans aren't the only Earth-dwelling animals to face the final frontier. Our journey to the stars has been aided by a number of different animals both yesteryear and today!

If you've ever given your pet an anti-flea and tick medicine, you may have wondered why there's not a similar drug out there for you. Here's a little dive into the history of these drugs, and why there may someday be a human-grade...

Start speaking a new language in 3 weeks with Babbel. Get up to 60% off in your subscription here: https://go.babbel.com/t?bsc=1200m60-y... Tinnitus, or ringing in the ears, often accompanies hearing loss, and usually has no treatment....

Hairworms, sometimes called horsehair or Gordian worms, are mind-controlling parasites with a twist. A genetic study found these nematomorph worms are missing 30% of their genome, and we don't understand how they live without genes for...

For decades, researchers thought they had a solid idea about the earliest booms in animal life. But new research might have turned off the gas on all these ideas, flipping our understanding of the Avalon explosion and the Cambrian...

Are there any non-human animals that take a task they don't want to do and think to themselves "Eh, I'll do it tomorrow"? Even if they know the task will be harder and/or more unpleasant by putting it off? One of our Patreon subscribers...

Around 10,000 years ago, somewhere in Africa, a microscopic parasite made a huge leap. With a little help from a mosquito, it left its animal host - probably a gorilla - and found its way to a new host: us.

For some reason, animals keep evolving into things that look like crabs, independently, over and over again. What is it about the crab’s form that makes it so evolutionarily successful that non-crabs are apparently jealous of it?

It might surprise you but cephalopods have a pretty good fossil record, with one major exception. If squids were swimming around in the same oceans as their closest cousins, where did all the squids go?

The marine reptiles Ichthyosaurs arose after The Great Dying, which wiped out at least 90 percent of life in the oceans, changing the seas forever and triggering a new evolutionary arms race between predator and prey.

Just a few thousand years ago, the island of Madagascar was inhabited by giant lemurs. How did such a diverse group of primates evolve in the first place, and how did they help shape the unique environments of Madagascar? And how did...

All told, the Arctic in the Cretaceous Period was a rough place to live, especially in winter. And yet, the fossils of many kinds of dinosaurs have been discovered there. So how were they able to survive in this harsh environment?

While dinosaurs were dominating the land, the metriorhynchids were thriving in the seas. But taking that plunge wasn’t easy because it takes a very special set of traits to fully dedicate yourself to life at sea.

They may not look like much, but beneath that shell lies an evolutionary mystery - one that stumped the biggest names in natural history for over a hundred years.

The California condor is the biggest flying bird in North America, a title that it has held since the Late Pleistocene Epoch. It's just one example of an organism that we share the planet with today that seems lost in time, out of place...

Because of their strange combination of bear-like and dog-like traits, they’re sometimes confusingly called the beardogs. And even though you’ve never met one of these animals, the beardogs are key to understanding the history of an...

How is it possible to have cataclysmic eruptions without any real cataclysm?

Paleodictyon, a hexagonal-patterned fossil, is a bit of a mystery. We don’t even know if it’s a trace fossil, or the organism itself. So… what could it be?

Elongated tubes, flat ribbons, and other “worm-like” body plans were so varied and abundant that a part of the Ediacaran is sometimes known as Wormworld. But in the end, the ancient Wormworld was ended by the actions of its very own worms.

Mystacodon is the earliest known mysticete, the group that, today, we call the baleen whales. But if this was a baleen whale, where was its baleen? Where did baleen come from? And how did it live without it?

Scientists had no idea what type of organisms the life forms of the Ediacaran were—lichen, colonies of bacteria, fungi or something else. It turns out, the key to solving the puzzle of Precambrian life was a tiny bit of fossilized fat.

The story of the egg spans millions of years, from the first vertebrates that dared to venture onto land to today’s mammals, including the platypus, and of course birds. Like chickens? We’re here to tell you: The egg came first.

At a site known as Cerro Ballena or Whale Hill, there are more than 40 skeletons of marine mammals -- a graveyard of ocean life dating back 6.5 million to 9 million years ago, in the Late Miocene Epoch. But the identity of the killer...