A tiny, long-necked marine predator that lived 245 million years ago is the oldest reptile ever found with an intact digestive system.

The exquisitely preserved fossil, including almost the entire skeleton as well as the stomach, liver and intestines, was found in Yunnan province in China in 2023 and is named Austronaga minuta.

Even blood vessels and the scales of a partially digested fish meal are visible in the remains.

“A fossil this age with such clear preservation of its organs is really a world treasure,” says at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, who wasn’t involved in the research.

Austronaga dates back to the Triassic Period, when dinosaurs first evolved, but it isn’t a dinosaur. It belongs to a broader group called archosaurs, which includes dinosaurs, birds and crocodiles, but not other famous marine reptiles like mosasaurs or ichthyosaurs.

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The archosaurs were incredibly diverse in the Triassic and included “all kinds of interesting and strange-looking reptiles”, says at the Natural History Museum Stuttgart, Germany, a member of the team that analysed the fossil. Only later, during the Jurassic and beyond, did they become more restricted, mostly being limited to dinosaurs, including birds, and crocodiles.

This specimen is a mere 60 centimetres in length, but as it is the only known example and the reptile’s age at death is unknown, it is impossible to say whether the species grew larger, says Spiekman.

However, he is confident that it was unlikely to have reached the size of its very long relative Dinocephalosaurus, the “Chinese sea dragon”, which could easily grow to over 4 metres.

“This was certainly a good and agile swimmer, mainly using its tail for swimming, its long front flippers for steering and its long neck to catch fish,” says Spiekman. “A�ܲ��ٰ��DzԲ����� probably would have looked a little like a lizard or a croc trying to be a seal or an otter and likely would have had scaly skin, for example.”

The fossil shows that the basic plan of the reptilian digestive tract has changed little in 245 million years, he says, and the “straight and simple intestines is what we see in most modern predatory reptiles, including those eating fish”.

Although the fossil is of high quality, the internal organs of Austronaga are only preserved in two dimensions. This is unlike those of a 380-million-year-old fossil of an armoured fish that Long and his colleagues , which is regarded as having the oldest known organs of any vertebrate.

“But this is still an incredibly well-preserved fossil,” he says.

“Most people are completely unaware of what is in the water,” says Julian Cremona, a naturalist and photographer who is out to change that with his new book.

Plankton is an umbrella term for all kinds of different organisms floating in our waters, from plants, known as phytoplankton, to animals, known as zooplankton. They can be as little as 0.02 micrometres, the size of some viruses, or as big as 2 metres, the size of a large jellyfish. What they have in common is that they aren’t powerful enough to overcome the movement of water, unlike organisms that can resist the current. As Cremona writes, plankton are “drifting organisms that are unable to determine their long-term direction and are at the whims of the current”.

Cremona’s book is a guide to the different types of plankton found along the British coast, such as the larva of a Magelona worm, just 2 millimetres in size, in the main image. To take this photograph, Cremona fitted objective lenses from an old microscope to his camera.

Below is a shot of a tiny zooplankter, Oikopleura. Its body is made up of a trunk on top of a long tail, ranging from a few millimetres to a centimetre long. It has a lifespan of five to six days, over which it grows, reproduces and finally dies.

Some larger plankton are shown below, including a handful of compass jellyfish (Chrysaora hysoscella), which are mostly found in northern Europe. The umbrella of this jellyfish can stretch to 30 centimetres in diameter, and it uses its 24 tentacles to catch its food: small fish, crabs and other jellyfish.

Pictured below is a swarm of moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita), the most common jellyfish to be found in the UK’s waters.

Some phytoplankton exhibit symbiosis with jellyfish and sea anemones, such as the aptly named snakelocks anemone (Anemonia viridis), pictured below. Single-celled Symbiodinium plankton live within the tissue of its green tentacles, where they perform photosynthesis and provide their host with carbohydrates. In return, the plankton receive inorganic carbon, nitrogen, phosphate – and a protected refuge in which to live.

A male jaguar has made an unprecedented trek, skirting 2100 kilometres of the southern edge of the Amazon rainforest. The journey – which crossed highways, farms, ranches and other human-modified landscapes – expands our knowledge of what these big cats are capable of.

was about 60 to 100 kilometres, says at University College Dublin in Ireland. Knowing these animals are capable of travelling much longer distances reveals further challenges in protecting them. “Individuals that are travelling so far are more exposed to human-related risks like hunting or killing because of attacks on livestock,” says Morant.

He and his colleagues have been tracking jaguars in Brazil via GPS collars as part of a larger ongoing project that started in 1999. The researchers wanted to better understand how jaguars use their environments along the Araguaia river, a potential wildlife corridor connecting the Cerrado grasslands with the Amazon.

They captured the male, dubbed Gaspar, as part of this work, fitting him with a collar on 11 November 2024. The 8-year-old jaguar then spent some time in his established range, about 700 square kilometres along the Araguaia river, before setting out on a massive southward trek, skirting the border of the Amazon to inland Cerrado.

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The researchers recorded that Gaspar travelled 2122 kilometres, until his collar stopped transmitting locations in late Novemeber 2025, but that is as the crow flies. The actual distance is probably much more, says Morant.

While Gaspar mostly stuck to forested areas, he also crossed through heavily modified human landscapes, such as farms, ranches and roads. Dispersals, albeit shorter ones, are common in individuals aged 1 to 3 years old that are looking to establish a new territory, but it is unclear why an older adult like Gaspar made this move. He might have been searching for better food resources, mating opportunities or a better habitat in general, says Morant.

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“Beyond the extraordinary distance travelled, I find [it] especially intriguing that he apparently did not establish a territory despite more than a year of continuous 
movement through areas that were, at least in part, potentially suitable for jaguars,” says at the Spanish National Research Council.

The findings also reveal an additional challenge in protecting such wide-ranging cats. In these human-modified areas, jaguars face threats from poaching, as ranchers often kill them to protect livestock. “Maybe we need to rethink how protected areas are framed and organised,” says Morant.

Gaspar’s fate is now uncertain. He may have been shot or poisoned, or the collar may have just stopped working, says Morant, which could mean Gaspar is still traversing the Brazilian landscape.

Jaguar and wildlife adventure in the Pantanal: Brazil

Explore the Pantanal on an intimate expedition, encountering jaguars, giant river otters and rich birdlife across the world’s largest tropical wetland.

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A parasitic fungus that grows on caterpillars has been turned into a dress designed to be able to repair itself if damaged.

In the video game and TV series The Last of Us, Cordyceps fungi evolve to infect humans and turn them into zombies, but in reality they are harmless to humans.

Using the fungus Cordyceps militaris as a base, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and her colleagues created a living textile that can be “programmed” with different properties using various microbial components.

It feels denser and less fibrous than cotton, says Li, and is closer to a soft, non-woven sheet or a flexible leather-like material.

“After washing and processing, the material does not have a strong mushroom-like smell,” she says. “A slight biological or fermentation-related odour may be detectable in freshly prepared samples, but this can be greatly reduced through cleaning, drying and post-treatment.”

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The fungus is made up of thin filaments known as hyphae. Li and her colleagues first grew the fungus as small, spherical pellets in liquid culture, then washed them and placed them into moulds where they formed a sheet.

To prevent the resulting textile from becoming brittle, it was soaked in glycerol, which acts as a “plasticiser”, making the naturally rigid fungal structure softer and more flexible.

“We do not use a conventional fabric, polymer mesh or other external supporting scaffold,” says Li. “The Cordyceps militaris mycelial pellets themselves serve as the structural building blocks, and their intertwined hyphae form a continuous, self-supporting sheet.”

To add colour to the material, the team introduced yeast cells that were engineered to produce orange, blue and purple pigments. “These cells can be applied to the fungal textile so that the colour is generated biologically, rather than through conventional synthetic dyes,” says Li.

The researchers also showed they could change the properties of the textile by adding other fungi, for example making it clean itself by repelling water droplets. For UV protection, they added Aspergillus niger, a mould that commonly grows on fruit and vegetables. This forms a dark layer on the surface of the material containing melanin pigment, which absorbs ultraviolet radiation.

If the textile is damaged, then fresh, wet fungal pellets can be applied to the area that needs repair and the fungus simply grows over the breach.

Under dry conditions, most biological activity is greatly reduced, and the cells may remain inactive or dormant, says Li.

But under humid conditions with nutrients present, some cells can become active again. This latent biological capacity is what enables functions such as regrowth and repair, and also means that the material is readily biodegradable, showing near-complete visible degradation in soil after just over 40 days.

Li and her colleagues created a dress out of their fungal material, but so far no one has worn it. “We’ve treated it as a rather precious display piece, and it was made in a small size,” she says. “Perhaps next time we should find a few petite and adventurous volunteers to try it on and see how it looks in motion.”

at the University of Sydney, Australia, says the biodegradability of the dress is amazing compared with what we currently have in terms of getting rid of waste from fast fashion.

But that is also a drawback because you don’t really want to be wearing something that is too easily biodegradable, as “it’ll break down while you’re wearing it”, he says.

As the textile is alive, Beardsley envisages one day being able to change its qualities in real time. “If there was some way that you can make it water-repellent for a while, becoming less breathable during rain, that would be fantastic, and then you can revert to the more breathable, less water-repellent version afterward,” he says.

Extraordinary underwater videos have captured orcas making sunfish explode by ramming them at high speed. The behaviour may help juvenile orcas feed by breaking the prey into many small pieces, but it also appears that the orcas may enjoy playing with their food.

“It’s a hunting tactic, but that involves a play game in the process,” says , an independent marine biologist in Mexico. “There’s ‘high-octane’ adrenaline and a lot of other hormones rushing through their bodies, so, of course, there’s got to be some sort of excitement.”

Sharp-tail sunfish (Masturus lanceolatus) are among the largest bony fish, weighing up to 2000 kilograms. Higuera had already seen groups of orcas (Orcinus orca) attacking sunfish in the Gulf of California, ripping off parts of their flesh and tossing them around to each other in a playful manner. In the past few years, he had even witnessed them .

Then, in July 2024, his colleague at US non-profit organisation Beneath the Waves caught an explosive interaction on her GoPro camera while diving in the Gulf of California. An adult female orca held onto a dead sunfish while an adult male orca swam upside down towards it at full speed. The female released the sunfish at the last second, and the male hit it with so much force that the fish burst into a flurry of small fragments.

A year later, tourist Hector Franz shot a similar underwater scene in the same bay. This time, an adult female rammed right-side-up into a sharp-tail sunfish held in place by another adult female, popping it into pieces. Combined, the two events mark the first time scientists have seen such behaviour by orcas, say Higuera, Ayres and their colleagues.

Sunfish have “an incredibly dense, rubbery, collagenous” outer layer that’s harder to bite through, so bursting them open could be an effective way to feed on them, says Higuera.

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“The explosive fragmentation seemed mostly to be of the stiff gelatinous capsule that makes up a high percentage – more than 80 per cent in large fish – of the body mass of the sunfish,” says at University College Cork in Ireland. “I suspect that calves cannot achieve enough force to do this, as their mass is too low. But they can exploit a cloud of objects that contain tasty morsels.”

Earlier sightings without full footage indicated that the entire pod was involved in a strategic attack process leading up to the rammings, says Higuera. The findings point to advanced cooperative hunting skills and even planning – especially adapting their techniques for different kinds of prey, he says.

Higuera suspects that popping the sunfish offered a learning experience for the calves, while providing them with bite-sized snacks. Simultaneously, these events could also reinforce social bonds through “play” and social learning in this highly intelligent species, he adds.

at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville says it is possible the orcas were having some fun in demolishing the fish, but play wouldn’t be the only goal, as there is clearly cooperative foraging going on as well.

“One of the fascinating things about play is that it can be a driver of behavioural innovation,” says at the University of Pisa, Italy. “It’s possible that a behaviour like this may have originated in a playful context and later acquired a feeding function, or vice versa. At this stage, we simply don’t know.”

A monkey with a distinctive mask-like face, found in a remote part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has been declared a new species – only the fifth new species of monkey documented from Africa in the past 75 years.

The monkey is known as likweli to local people who hunt it for bushmeat, and it has been given the scientific name Colobus congoensis. It lives in one of the most inaccessible parts of Africa, without paved roads or infrastructure.

“A typical expedition involves multiple modes of transportation: a flight, followed by a motorcycle ride, two days of hiking on foot and finally travel by dugout canoe to reach the monkey’s range,” says at Florida Atlantic University.

One of the most intriguing features of likweli is its facial appearance, says Detwiler. The light-coloured skin around the mouth and beneath the nose is unlike that of any other African colobus species, but resembles the facial pattern seen in some Asian colobine monkeys.

Detwiler and her colleagues believe the species’ mask-like face may represent ancestral traits that were present before the African and Asian colobine lineages diverged over 8 million years ago. “If so, likweli may have retained characteristics that were subsequently modified or lost in the other African colobus species,” says Detwiler.

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Like other colobus monkeys, likweli also has a distinctive body odour that defies description, she says.

Scientists first became aware of the species in 2008 when a team surveying on the banks of the Lomami river, in what is now Lomami National Park, took a photo that showed only a part of a monkey that had not been seen before, high in the canopy.

Then, in November 2018, another group again spotted the monkey, which is about 1.3 metres long and weighs around 7 kilograms. Between 2018 and 2022, there were 114 recorded observations of the new species, 25 of which were from vocalisations.

In 2021, several monkeys that had been killed by hunters for bushmeat were confiscated and handed over to researchers. Detailed morphological and genetic analysis confirmed they were indeed a wholly separate species. Genetic tests and recordings of their vocalisations also added to the evidence of their uniqueness.

“The genetic analyses revealed that likweli is a deeply divergent lineage that split from its closest known relative, Colobus satanas, approximately 4 to 5 million years ago,” says Detwiler. “That was much older than we expected and provided strong evidence that likweli represents a distinct species.”

Likweli is isolated from C. satanas by more than 1200 kilometres and several major river barriers. Unlike most other members of the genus, which have habitats exceeding 60,000 square kilometres, likweli is only known to exist in 1700 square kilometres of rainforest.

“Hunting is one of the primary threats facing likweli, particularly because the species has such a small known range and appears to occur at low densities,” says Detwiler.

Because of the risk of poaching and the monkey’s small population and home range, the team is proposing that the species should be listed as endangered. “Now that likweli has been recognised as a distinct species, another important step would be to grant it protected status under national law,” says Detwiler. “This would make it illegal to hunt the species, including in the buffer zone surrounding the park.”

Dinosaurs are the biggest creatures to have ever walked on land, dominating Earth for over 130 million years. But how could such extraordinary creatures have simply vanished in the blink of a geological eye? For decades, we’ve assumed these prehistoric megafauna – a staple of our childhoods and Hollywood movies – went extinct for one simple reason: the asteroid that hit Earth was so unimaginably large that it changed everything in one single blow. But now, thanks to new research, an even more intriguing idea has emerged: size alone doesn’t explain what happened.

The real reason the impact was so devastating may have been its angle. Had the asteroid arrived a little steeper, the outcome might have been different. A little shallower, different again. And for life on Earth at the time, predominantly dinosaurs on land, marine creatures in the sea and pterosaurs in the air, it appears to have struck at almost the worst possible angle imaginable, launching vast quantities of rock, dust and climate-altering gases high into the atmosphere and triggering one of the greatest mass extinctions in Earth’s history.