September 2026– date –

Cover photograph: “Fkeysmacro.jpg” by Chris Hind, licensed under CC BY 3.0. A motionless animal might be asleep. It might also be awake, waiting for prey or resting quietly. To tell the difference, researchers look beyond stillness: how ...

Cover photograph: Peter Schmidt How does a koala spend its day? Curled into the fork of a tree, it may remain almost motionless for hours. It looks asleep, but some of that time may be spent resting while awake. At the other extreme, a s...

Cover photograph by Simone Dinoia Sleep takes time away from finding food, moving about and watching for danger. Yet humans and many other animals regularly make time for it. Sleep—or a state with some of its defining features—has been r...

Among living birds, some occupy a particularly narrow place within a chosen classification system: their family contains only one living genus, and that genus contains only one living species. In this article, I will call this arrangemen...

A desert plant with only two permanent leaves. A Japanese conifer found naturally nowhere else on Earth. A tiny moss that seems to shine green in the dark. Welwitschia mirabilis, Sciadopitys verticillata, and Schistostega pennata look no...

In the cool, rain-soaked forests of southern Chile and Argentina lives a tiny marsupial with rounded ears, dark rings around its eyes and a long tail that helps it move through branches. It is called the monito del monte—roughly, “little...

Ants are easy to overlook on a walk. One may be carrying something across the ground, another may pause at the base of a leaf, and a third may disappear into a hollow stem. These small movements can reveal remarkable relationships betwee...