The way that a flock of birds flies or a school of fish swims may involve more than individuals simply judging the distance between themselves in the group. Recently, scientists from the University of ...

Scientists found a long-tailed, patterned animal on sand dunes and discovered a new species, a study said. Photo from Orlova, Rasegar-Pouyani, Rajabizadeh, Nabizadeh, Poyarkov, Melnikov and Nazarov ...

Whether an animal has spots, stripes or neither depends on the size of the embryo when two types of melanin form on its skin: eumelanin, which gives dark hair when abundant or light when not, and ...

Nature is full of many patterned animals, from the stripes on zebras, spots on leopards, to the intricate details on sea creatures. Researchers have studied for a long time the biological explanation ...

This story appears in the July 2016 issue of National Geographic magazine. If a zebra zigs, will its stripes make a predator zag? That’s the idea behind motion dazzle, a century-old hypothesis about ...