Russell B Connelly is a postgraduate researcher and marine biologist at the School of Life Sciences of the University of Essex. After completing a BSc and MRes at the University of Essex, he began a PhD at the same university, focusing on new monitoring techniques for populations of UK seahorse species.

Together with colleagues, he recently published a study in Frontiers in Marine Science describing remarkable, never-before-seen geometric clusters of nests of cryonotothenioid fish, also known as icefish. These were first filmed 2019 by the remotely operated vehicle ‘Lassie’  operating from the ship SA Agulhas II in the Western Weddell near the Sea Larsen C Ice Shelf. In this editorial, he summarizes their discovery and its importance.

QUT researchers have uncovered critical biological processes that allow corals attach to a reef in a finding that could significantly improve coral restoration efforts worldwide.

The distinctive coloured fur of two of Australia's rarest marsupials could be caused by 'broken' pigment genes, new research from La Trobe University has found.

Scientists from the Canadian Museum of Nature have announced the discovery and description of an extinct rhinoceros from the Canadian High Arctic. The nearly complete fossil skeleton of the new species was recovered from the fossil-rich lake deposits in Haughton Crater on Devon Island, Nunavut and is the most northerly rhino species known. Rhinoceroses have an evolutionary history that spanned over 40 million years, encompassing all continents except South America and Antarctica. The “Arctic rhino” lived about 23 million years ago, during the Early Miocene and is most closely related to other rhino species that thrived in Europe millions of years earlier. The paper also describes that the new Arctic species migrated to North America across a land bridge that may have been a passage for terrestrial-mammal dispersal millions of years later than previous evidence suggests.