Research lab
Major London museum holding vast zoological, paleontological, and geological collections, including many taxonomic type specimens.
WWF's Living Planet Report 2026 finds monitored wildlife populations have fallen 73% on average since 1970. The report's case that conservation can work leans on bluefin tuna back in UK waters, credited to quota cuts, size limits and protected spawning grounds.
Reality
Researchers at King's College London and Imperial College London pooled 423 studies and found most of 23 ecosystem benefits rise steadily with diversity. Species appear to stand in for one another less than ecologists assumed, so even small losses tend to cut what ecosystems provide.
Reality
Natural History Museum and Oxford researchers matched the timing of more than 6,000 Nigerian Lassa cases using rainfall and nearly 30 years of rodent data. Because the model runs on weather and rodent ecology, health authorities could use it to anticipate when the risk of spillover to people climbs each season.
Reality
Dinodontosaurus turns up outside South America for the first time, in Tanzanian rocks that also hold the world's oldest dinosaur candidates, and the South American sequences it matches carry younger radiometric dates.
Reality
Dinodontosaurus isiyavamanda, described from bones a British expedition collected in the 1960s, extends a South American genus into Tanzania. The shared genus argues that those Tanzanian beds are no older than South America's.
Reality
A trip to the Natural History Museum's 19th-century Ecuadorian frogs showed the original specimens had been filed against the wrong animal, leaving a loud, common Choco frog with no name of its own until now.
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Praearcturus gigas carried pincers longer than 16 centimetres and hunted 415 million years ago, before trees and before the high-oxygen atmosphere palaeontologists usually invoke to explain giant arthropods.
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The Abu-Tartur assemblage now runs to seven lamniform species. The phosphate bed that preserved them is a condensed section, which is why the authors read productivity out of it rather than a living community.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
DNA from a 190-year-old type specimen in London settles which name the Himalayan pangolin carries. Species-level matching of trafficked scales gets easier; region-level tracing does not, yet.
Reality