Blurs

At depths of up to 7 kilometres, scientists have discovered hundreds of whale fossils — and living ecosystems thriving on whales that have fallen there today. There is a place on Earth where the dead don't simply disappear. They become ecosystems. Far beneath the Indian Ocean, in darkness that sunlight has never reached, the bodies of whales sink through thousands of metres of water and eventually come to rest on the seabed. Their flesh attracts scavengers. Their bones become habitats. Bacteria extract chemical energy from what remains. Specialised worms bore into the skeleton. Molluscs live from the chemistry generated by decomposition.  And after the animals themselves have vanished, their bones can remain behind for geological periods of time. Now scientists have discovered a vast accumulation of these remains in one of the least explored environments on Earth. It stretches for approximately 1,200 kilometres across the Diamantina Zone of the southeastern Indian Ocean. Researcher...

Sometimes a fossil is more than the remains of a dead animal. Sometimes it is a geographical mystery.  A creature is discovered thousands of miles from where scientists expected it to be. A tropical species turns up in what was once a surprisingly cold region. A land animal appears on an island separated from the mainland by an ocean. A familiar species is found in rocks that suggest an environment completely unlike the one its living relatives inhabit. These discoveries can force scientists to reconsider ancient geography, climate and migration. But they also raise a more intriguing question: How many times have we underestimated the ability of prehistoric animals to cross the planet? The world they inhabited wasn't the world we know today. Continents moved. Seas appeared and disappeared. Land bridges formed and vanished. Ice sheets expanded. Deserts became grasslands, and forests spread across regions that are now frozen or barren. Coastlines also migrated by hundreds of kilometr...

In 2021, a vet carrying out routine testing on a farm in North Wales made an extraordinary discovery: a calf with what appeared to be a fully formed third eye in the middle of its forehead.  The animal would eventually be rescued from slaughter and given the name Mahadev, after the Hindu deity Shiva. But what could cause an animal to develop an extra eye? There are countless stories of strange animals, unusual births and supposed creatures with extraordinary abilities. Many turn out to be exaggerated, misidentified or outright hoaxes. The three-eyed calf discovered in North Wales, however, was something different. It was real. In May 2021, veterinarian Malan Hughes, from Pwllheli, was carrying out routine tuberculosis testing on cattle at a farm on the Llŷn Peninsula in Gwynedd when she noticed something unusual about one of the calves. It had three eyes. The animal had the normal pair of eyes on either side of its head, but between them, positioned in the centre of its forehead, w...