There’s been a lot going on in animal news this year.
Perhaps the best animal story of 2024 came right at the end of the year, when orcas (Orcinus orca) started wearing salmon hats again after a 37-year hiatus from the fabulous fad. And while scientists don’t really know why orcas are balancing dead fish on their heads, the best guess is there is so much of their favorite food — chum salmon (Oncorhynchus keta) — available, it’s a way to save it for later.
But there was plenty of other news from the animal kingdom this year. We found out that female gibbons do the robot and “vogue” — but only if they’re sure someone else is watching. Researchers aren’t sure why the apes do it (the dancing was seen in wild and captive gibbons), but it seems to relate to sex, food and their social lives.
Speaking of food, we had two never-before-seen cases of predators eating each other. In the sea, a pregnant portbeagle shark (Lamna nasus) got gobbled up by another shark — likely a great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) or a shortfin mako (Isurus oxyrinchus). And on land, a Burmese python (Python bivittatus) was seen feasting on an even bigger reticulated python (Malayopython reticulatus) from the tail up, while it was still alive. A Burmese python in Florida also swallowed a deer whole by stretching its mouth to almost the limit of what is physically possible for the species.
In the insect world, scientists discovered that ants carry out life-saving operations by performing amputations on injured nestmates — becoming the only known animal in the world other than humans to do so.
Cassius, the world’s largest captive crocodile, died in November, having potentially reached the ripe old age of 120. He was captured in the Finniss River, near Darwin, Australia, in 1984 after he started eating livestock, attacking boat engines and fighting other crocodiles. Scientists are now studying his bones to find out exactly how old he was when he died.
And it wasn’t just living animals making headlines. In August, Siberian gold miners accidentally stumbled upon the mummified remains of a woolly rhino (Coelodonta antiquitatis) with its horn and soft tissues still intact. A winemaker in Austria found hundreds of mammoth bones while renovating his cellar, and scientists performed an autopsy on a 44,000-year-old mummified wolf pulled from the permafrost.
Related: 35,000-year-old saber-toothed kitten with preserved whiskers pulled from permafrost in Siberia
Researchers in the U.K., meanwhile, discovered what could have been the biggest marine reptile ever found. This ichthyosaur, which lived 200 million years ago, is estimated to have been a whopping 82 feet (25 meters) long. Also from the age of the dinosaurs, palaeontologists in Morocco discovered a never-before-seen species of marine lizard with “dagger-like” teeth; and in Brazil, heavy rains exposed one of the oldest dinosaur skeletons ever discovered.
And where the living and long-dead collide, scientists now say the de-extinction of species like the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) and Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus) is “closer than people think.” Researchers working on the effort claim bringing back ice age megafauna could help restore ancient ecosystems, boost carbon storage and mitigate climate change — but it remains to be seen whether it will cause catastrophic, unintended consequences.
“We have this hubris as humans that we can control our technology,” Oswald Schmitz, a professor of population and community ecology at Yale University, told Live Science. “I’m not so convinced.”
Animal news quiz 2024
