Crop Circles: The Animal Connection
By Wren Ashby · Published May 8, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 8, 2026. Crop Circles and the Animal Connection: What the Field Record Shows Most flattened-cereal crop circles in southern English wheat are anthropogenic, traceable to the 1991 admission by Doug Bower and Dave Chorley and the artists who followed […]
Interspecies Adoption: Dog Nursing Kittens
By Wren Ashby · Published May 8, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 8, 2026. A lactating dog will sometimes accept orphaned kittens, groom them, and let them latch and feed. The behavior is reliable enough that shelters use it, and odd enough that the internet rediscovers it every spring. The animal-behavior […]
The Curious Case of Two-Headed Snakes
By Wren Ashby · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated September 10, 2026 Last updated: September 10, 2026. The Curious Case of Two-Headed Snakes A two-headed snake is the most photogenic answer to a quiet embryological question: what happens when a single embryo begins to twin and then changes its mind. The condition is called […]
Albinism in The Wild: A Dangerous Anomaly
By Wren Ashby · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 7, 2026. What Is Albinism in Wild Animals? Albinism in wild animals is a heritable autosomal recessive condition in which mutations on one of several pigmentation genes (most commonly TYR, OCA2, TYRP1, or SLC45A2) prevent the synthesis of melanin. […]
The Tomb of Genghis Khan
By Wren Ashby · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated September 10, 2026 Last updated: September 10, 2026. A working ethologist will tell you that the most informative animals in a story are the ones nobody is looking at. In the case of the lost tomb of Genghis Khan (born Temüjin, c. 1162-1227), the animals […]
Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly Migration
By Wren Ashby · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 7, 2026. What Is the Mystery of Monarch Butterfly Migration? The mystery of monarch butterfly migration is that no single butterfly completes the round-trip journey. Each year, a “super-generation” born in late summer flies up to 4,000 kilometers from […]