The megalodon has long been imagined as an enormous great white shark, but new research suggests that perception is all wrong. The study finds the prehistoric hunter had a much longer body—closer in shape to a lemon shark or even a large whale.

A new scientific study provides many new insights into the biology of the prehistoric gigantic shark, Megalodon or megatooth shark, which lived nearly worldwide 15-3.6 million years ago. Paleobiology professor Kenshu Shimada of DePaul University led the study along with 28 other shark, fossil, and vertebrate anatomy experts around the globe. Findings from the study will be published in the journal “Palaeontologia Electronica.”

A new review article highlights the transformative role of circular RNA (circRNA) in cancer, revealing its potential as both a key player in tumor biology and a promising avenue for future therapies. Once thought to be noncoding RNA, circRNA has now been shown to encode functional proteins, challenging conventional RNA biology and opening up novel therapeutic possibilities.

An international team of scientists has synchronized key climate records from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to unravel the sequence of events during the last million years before the extinction of the dinosaurs at the Cretaceous/Paleogene boundary. New high resolution geochemical records for the first time reveal when and how two major eruption phases of gigantic flood basalt volcanism had an impact on climate and biota in the late Maastrichtian era 66 to 67 million years ago. Their study was now published in Science Advance.

A modular metabolism may explain the environmental success of certain sulphate-reducing bacteria. This is the result of a study published this week in the journal Science Advances. A research team led by scientists from the University of Oldenburg, Germany, investigated the role of the Desulfobacteraceae family of bacteria that are very active in anaerobic sediments. The team reports that all studied strains possess the same central metabolic architecture for harvesting energy, for example. However, some strains possess additional molecular modules that enable them to utilise diverse organic substances. The results could lead to the development of new analytical tools to measure the activity of sulfate-reducing microbes directly in the seafloor and advance our understanding of their relevance for the climate

A new analysis from researchers at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History reveals that nearly half of the genus Heliconia, a group of tropical plants popular for their bright, beak-shaped flowers, are threatened with extinction.

New research from the University of Oxford has provided fresh insights into how bird songs evolve over time, revealing a significant role for population dynamics in shaping song diversity and change. The findings – based on an analysis of over 100,000 bird songs – have been published today (7 March) in the journal Current Biology.