News Archive for June 2026

Paludocyon moyasolai. Image credit: Jesús Gamarra.

New Species of Ancient Bear-Dog Identified in Spain

Jun 11, 2026 by Natali Anderson

Paleontologists have identified a previously unknown species of amphicyonid — the extinct family of carnivorous mammals popularly known as bear-dogs...

The short-eared dog (Atelocynus microtis) from a trap camera in Bolivia. Image credit: G. Ayala & M.E Viscarra.

Amazon’s Elusive Short-Eared Dog May Be More Common than Researchers Once Thought

Jun 11, 2026 by Natali Anderson

Hundreds of camera-trap records from Bolivia and Peru suggest the short-eared dog (Atelocynus microtis), one of the world’s least-known canids and one...

This image of a dwarf gray fox (Urocyon sp.) was captured on the island of Cozumel, Mexico: an adult male is shown partially concealed behind foliage before capture by the Fundación de Parques y Museos de Cozumel on September 14, 2023; this represents the first photograph ever taken of the species on the island and the first reported sighting since 2001. Image credit: Rafael Chacón.

Scientists Capture First-Ever Images of Cozumel Dwarf Fox

Jun 11, 2026 by Natali Anderson

Researchers have obtained the first-ever photographs of the Cozumel dwarf fox (Urocyon sp.), an elusive dwarf fox living on the Caribbean island of Cozumel,...

Cave lions painted in the Chauvet Cave, France.

Study: Cave Lions were Distinct Species that Occasionally Bred with Ancestors of Today’s Lions

Jun 10, 2026 by Sergio Prostak

The extinct Eurasian cave lion (Panthera spelaea) and today’s African and Asian lions (Panthera leo) belong to separate evolutionary lineages that diverged...

Quantum mechanics defies classical intuition, most famously through Schrödinger’s cat, where systems exist in superpositions of opposing states. Such superpositions are central to quantum technologies. Quantum ‘cat’ states have been realized in harmonic oscillators, but implementations were largely limited to Fock, displaced, or Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill states. A different class of macroscopic superpositions, where an oscillator is squeezed along orthogonal axes so that its positional variance is simultaneously larger and smaller than the Heisenberg limit, was proposed previously but remained unrealized. Saner et al. introduce a trapped-ion hybrid spin-oscillator system enabling an experimental realization of these ‘siblings’ of Schrödinger’s cat. Image credit: Saner et al., doi: 10.1103/k1xk-yt42.

Schrödinger’s Cat Gets Stranger: Physicists Demonstrate Quantum States No One Has Seen Before

Jun 10, 2026 by News Staff

Physicists at the University of Oxford have engineered a new class of ‘cat states’ — quantum superpositions constructed not from ordinary wave...

Artist’s reconstruction of the Fractofusus community: the bottom right features a large Fractofusus around which there are 5 to 8 medium specimens clustered; each of the medium specimens also has small specimens clustered around them; the small specimens therefore form an independent double cluster pattern, namely clusters of clusters. Image credit: C.G. Kenchington.

Earth’s Earliest Animals May Have Thrived Too Easily to Evolve

Jun 10, 2026 by News Staff

Fossils from some of the oldest-known animals on Earth, dating from 574 million years ago (Ediacaran period), suggest that cloning, not competition, dominated...

XRF map of 7.53 g slice of NWA 12593: calcium (Ca) and iron (Fe) illustrate the location and diversity of clasts; sulfur (S) highlights the location of cracks and terrestrial weathering. Image credit: Crow et al., doi: 10.1130/G54386.1.

Lunar Meteorite Preserves Evidence of Colossal Asteroid Strike

Jun 10, 2026 by News Staff

Planetary scientists analyzing a lunar meteorite known as Northwest Africa (NWA) 12593 have uncovered evidence of an asteroid impact that occurred 3.5...

The Linnaeus’s two-toed sloth (Choloepus didactylus) at London Zoo. Image credit: Dick Culbert / CC BY 2.0.

Secret to Sloths’ Slow Life May Lie in Ancient ‘Jumping Genes’

Jun 10, 2026 by News Staff

Along with armadillos and anteaters, sloths are members of Xenarthra, the only clade of placental mammals to have originated in South America. In new research,...

An artist’s impression of Patagoniaemys aeschyli. Image credit: Nawel Vazquez / Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales ‘Bernardino Rivadavia’ / CONICET.

Fossil Discovery in Patagonia Reveals New Species of Horned Turtle

Jun 9, 2026 by Enrico de Lazaro

Paleontologists have identified a new species of meiolaniform turtle from northern Patagonia, Argentina, that lived during the Maastrichtian age, just...

Sala Keimada, a chamber of Cueva Palomera in Burgos, Spain. Image credit: Ortega-Martínez et al., doi: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2026.105818.

Spanish Cave Sanctuary Reveals More Than 11,500 Years of Activity

Jun 9, 2026 by Enrico de Lazaro

New radiocarbon dates from Sala Keimada, a hard-to-reach chamber of Cueva Palomera in the province of Burgos, northern Spain, suggest that generations...

This image from the Subaru Telescope shows the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. Image credit: NAOJ.

Astronomers Scan Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS for Alien Radio Signals

Jun 9, 2026 by Enrico de Lazaro

Using the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array, a 42-element radio interferometer at Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Hat Creek, California, astronomers...

The cheerful fantail (Rhipidura laguceria) in November 2022. Image credit: James A. Eaton.

Ornithologists Describe New Bird Species from Remote Indonesian Islands

Jun 8, 2026 by Natali Anderson

A small songbird inhabiting the Babar Islands, in the Banda Sea, Indonesia, has been identified as a new species after a duo of researchers discovered...

A reconstruction of Homo longi in his habitat. Image credit: Chuang Zhao.

Acheulean Toolmakers Chose Their Stone with Surprising Precision

Jun 8, 2026 by News Staff

Geochemical analysis of 780,000-year-old stone tools from Israel suggests Acheulean (or Acheulian) hominins repeatedly sought specific basalt sources,...

This image shows the evidence for the wind blowing away from Sagittarius A*: the white dot in the center of the image shows the supermassive black hole; in orange is data from ALMA, mapping the location of cold gas composed of carbon monoxide in the image; in blue is X-ray data from Chandra; a large cone-shaped cavity, visible as an absence of cold gas in the ALMA data, is filled by hot X-ray-emitting gas in the Chandra data. Image credit: NASA / CXC / UMass / Wang et al. / ALMA / ESO / NAOJ / NRAO / Longmore et al. / Minniti et al.

Astronomers Finally Find Milky Way’s Missing Black Hole Wind

Jun 8, 2026 by News Staff

After a 50-year search, astronomers have uncovered evidence that Sagittarius A* — the 4.3-million-solar-mass black hole that resides at the center...

Fault-controlled basins and interpreted structural frame in the newly-identified East Antarctic Fan-Shaped Basin Province. Image credit: Armadillo et al., doi: 10.1038/s41561-026-01991-6.

Geoscientists Find Vast Fan-Shaped Structure beneath Antarctica’s Ice

Jun 8, 2026 by News Staff

By combining seismic, gravity and topographic data, a team of researchers from Italy, Switzerland, Germany and the United Kingdom found that several well-known...

This VST image shows Gum 10 and Gum 11, two nebulae in the southern constellation of Puppis. Image credit: ESO / VPHAS+ Team.

Two Glowing Nebulae Spark Cosmic Pareidolia in New VST Image

Jun 8, 2026 by Enrico de Lazaro

Astronomers using ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope have captured a spectacular image of two little-known nebulae: Gum 10 and Gum 11. This VST image shows Gum...

The Heaven Sword tree. Image credit: Chia-Chun Hsu et al., doi: 10.3389/ffgc.2026.1746112.

After Decade-Long Hunt, Scientists Find East Asia’s Tallest Tree

Jun 5, 2026 by Natali Anderson

Deep in the mountains of northern Taiwan, a towering Taiwania cryptomerioides — a large coniferous tree in the cypress family Cupressaceae whose...

Marine fishes from the Early Paleocene site of Qreiya 3 in the Eastern Desert of Egypt. Image credit: Ian Baylatry.

Fish Fossils from Early Paleocene Fill 10-Million-Year Gap after Dinosaur Extinction

Jun 5, 2026 by News Staff

Around 66 million years ago, the end-Cretaceous extinction event reshaped Earth’s biodiversity, yet its impact on marine fishes remains debated due to...

As planets and stars travel through the streams of charged particles flowing across space, their magnetic fields act like obstacles; incoming particles are slowed and deflected, forming a boundary called the bow shock; just ahead of this boundary lies the foreshock, a variable region where magnetic conditions can accelerate some particles to nearly the speed of light. Image credit: Ben C. Smith, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

Jupiter Accelerates Electrons to Near-Light Speed, Offering Clues to Cosmic Ray Origins

Jun 5, 2026 by Enrico de Lazaro

The giant planet’s bow shock isn’t just deflecting the solar wind, it’s acting as a powerful particle accelerator, firing electrons to relativistic...

Paleoartistic reconstruction of the environment in the surrounding of Camp dels Ninots maar lake during the Early Pliocene. Image credit: Mauricio Antón.

Half-Ton Cattle Relatives Roamed Europe 4 Million Years Ago

Jun 5, 2026 by News Staff

Near-complete bovine skeletons unearthed the Early Pliocene site of Camp dels Ninots in northeastern Spain reveal that the ancestors of today’s buffalo...

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