A group of Florida Museum of Natural History scientists has issued a “call to action” to use big data to tackle longstanding questions about plant diversity and evolution and forecast how plant life will fare on an increasingly human-dominated planet. In a commentary published today in Nature Plants, the scientists urged their colleagues to take advantage…

When trouble looms, the fish-scale geckos of Madagascar resort to what might seem like an extreme form of self-defense — tearing out of their own skin. Their unusually large, overlapping scales flake off so easily that one biologist in the late 1800s tried collecting the geckos with cotton, but even with careful handling, few fish-scale…

New research shows climate change is altering the delicate seasonal clock that North American migratory songbirds rely on to successfully mate and raise healthy offspring, setting in motion a domino effect that could threaten the survival of many familiar backyard bird species. A growing shift in the onset of spring has left nine of 48…