This is Migaloo, the albino white humpback whale. His name is derived from an Aboriginal word that means “white fella.” Migaloo is a favorite for whale watching enthusiasts. He is believed to be the only documented white humpback whale in the world.

He was discovered in 1991 and quickly became popular with tourists and locals alike. Since then, sightings have been rare. He migrates from Antarctica to Australia on a yearly basis, and some years he slips by undetected. Most of these photos were taken in 2012 on Migaloo’s return to Antarctica. ...

This is a Palm Cockatoo, also know as the Goliath Cockatoo.

Palms are distinguished by their size, huge beak (second only to the Hyacinth Macaw among psittacines and largest proportionate to size), solid black feather coloration, large open crest, bare red cheeks, and red and black tongue. You have to see their tongues to believe the coloration. It's amazing.

Palm Cockatoos are severely threatened. They are CITES Appendix I birds and are protected in Australia.

As a testament to their rarity, typical prices in the U.S. for Aterrimus Palms are around $8000 and Goliaths around $14,000. Perhaps contributing to their rarity is the fact that, according to both Low and Forshaw, they lay only one egg per clutch.

...

At first, it just looks like a worm. But when you peek closer, it slithers like a snake. It sticks its tongue out like a snake. It creeps you out like a snake.

Discovered under a rock in 2006 in Barbados, this thread snake is as thin as spaghetti and smaller than any of the 3,100 other known snake species. Researchers believe it is the smallest a snake can evolve to be.

Even though being afraid of the dark sounds childish, our fear of the dark is an evolutionary trait that we picked up to survive real-life predators stalking the night. Researchers have hypothesised that this innate fear stems from a point of human history when we were nowhere near the top predators we are today. Humans only really became super predators with the advent of technology, which wasn’t that long ago.

Before technology, our ancestors were constantly on the look-out for predators that wanted nothing more than to chow down on human sandwiches. To make that even scarier, most of these predators hunted at night - a time of day when we are especially vulnerable to attack because of our relatively poor eyesight.  

This means that it was ...

When it comes to the animal kingdom, we often find ourselves marveling at the diversity of species that inhabit our planet. Regardless of our differences, the more we delve into the intricacies of genetics and biology, the more we realize just how interconnected all life on Earth truly is. One remarkable example of this interconnectedness is the relationship between humans, bonobos, and chimpanzees. Despite the differences in their "personality" traits, our DNA tells a compelling story of our shared ancestry with these incredible primates.

Bonobos and chimpanzees, our closest living relatives in the animal kingdom, are often viewed as two sides of the same evolutionary coin. While they share approximately 98 percent of their DNA with each ot ...

An international team of scientists has sequenced the coffee genome and has found that the caffeine in coffee plants evolved separately to the caffeine in tea plants.

Source: http://www.nature.com/nature/archive/category.html?code=archive_news&year=2014 ...