When Habelia optata first skittered into public consciousness more than a century ago, scientists didn’t know what to make of it. The long-extinct sea predator, which flourished during the middle Cambrian period about 508 million years ago, measured less than a inch long, yet it wasn’t an animal you’d be keen to encounter. “Tiny yet…

In the subterranean rivers and flooded caverns of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula—once thought to hold the path to Xibalba, the mythical Mayan underworld—scientists have uncovered a liminal world where methane is the unlikely driving force for life. After plumbing the depths of Ox Bel Ha, a submerged estuary complex that rivals Texas’ Galveston Bay in size,…

Scientists have converted a bunch of microbes into what they’ve dubbed the “world’s smallest tape recorder.” By tinkering with the genes of an ordinary laboratory strain of Escherichia coli bacteria, researchers say they’ve been able to coax the bacteria into not only logging their interactions with the environment but time-stamping these occurrences, as well. These…

In the briny waters of Jervis Bay on Australia’s east coast, where three rocky outcrops jut out from piles of broken scallop shells, beer bottles, and lead fishing lures, a clutch of octopuses gambol among a warren of nearly two dozen dens. Welcome to Octlantis. The bustling community belies conventionally held notions of the cephalopods,…