[unable to retrieve full-text content]Contrary to public perception, die-offs in honeybee colonies are an agricultural not a conservation issue, argue researchers, who say that manged honeybees may contribute to the genuine biodiversity crisis of Europe's declining wild pollinators....
Read more
Researchers pose revolutionary theory on horse evolution
[unable to retrieve full-text content]While it is largely believed that horses simply evolved with fewer digits, researchers pose a new theory that suggests remnants of all five toes are still present within the hooves of the horse....
Read more
Swaths of Asia inhabited by surprisingly related 'Lizards of the Lost Arcs'
A new paper appearing in Proceedings of the Royal Society B shows a varied collection of lizards throughout Asia to be unexpectedly close cousins of beach-dwelling mourning geckos, all descended from a common ancestor species that thrived along an ancient archipelago in the West Pacific that served as a "superhighway" of biodiversity.
The dispersal of these...
Ecologist unearths the foothill yellow-legged frog's past in order to inform its future
[unable to retrieve full-text content]Once abundant in Southern California, the foothill yellow-legged frog inexplicably vanished from the region sometime between the late 1960s and early 1970s. The reasons behind its rapid extirpation have been an ecological mystery....
Read more
Honeycomb maze offers significant improvement over current spatial navigation tests
[unable to retrieve full-text content]A powerful new tool for the study of spatial memory offers a significant improvement over the current gold standard, the Morris Water Maze. The novel Honeycomb Maze design allows for systematic analysis of the decisions an animal makes during navigation....
Read more
The origin of snakes: New evolutionary scenario
The early evolution of snakes happened from surface-terrestrial to burrowing in the lizard-snake transition suggests a research group at the University of Helsinki.
The group's new findings redirect the debate on evolution towards a new underexplored evolutionary scenario. Thus, the study adds another dimension to the investigation of snake origins.
Research studies have previously established that snakes...