Articles by

Susan Milius

How a mushroom coral goes for a walk without legs

A coral walks into a (sand) bar. This may sound like a joke. But new time-lapse photography...

Extinct moa ate purple trufflelike fungi, fossil bird droppings reveal

For the first time, ancient DNA from droppings left by New Zealand’s flightless moa identifies actual species...

Mole or marsupial? This subterranean critter with a backward pouch is both

Evolving a dig-in-the-dark mole lifestyle comes with radical anatomical changes, making it hard even to guess the...

Poop is on the menu for a surprising number of animals

Feces don’t get enough credit as food. The stinky stuff is not just an end product after...

Climate stress may undermine male spiders’ romantic gift giving

Courtship dazzle in spiders can lose some zing in uncertain climates. Males in places with hard-to-predict rain...

Here’s how long it would take 100 worms to eat the plastic in one face mask

Insects rank high among humankind’s go-to creatures for strangeness: Think movie monster inspirations or extreme biophysics (SN:...

Videos capture orcas’ tricks for taking down the largest fish on Earth

Video from excited ecotourists shows how orcas manage an unlikely feat of predation: killing a massive whale...

This ‘hidden figure’ of entomology fought for civil rights

On the drive to school, at the first sign of trouble, “she made me get on the...