The giant panda is an icon of conservation but no longer needs to be an icon of inexplicable colouration in animals.

One drought-beating tree with an aura of affluence can wear its crown of thorns as a halo.

Have rock hyraxes been shaped by a capricious Creator, or just recreational killing by baboons?

Evolutionary pressure to be mammal-like seems like water off these ratites’ backs.

Nature’s geometrical caricatures point out our everyday blindness to where the tails of fishes really begin and end.

By daring to swim, sargassum forms a triad with two opposite fishes that both dare to unswim.

The honey badger embodies the drama of big game country, whereas the wolverine is a concentrate of Siberian emptiness.

The lioness may show off in more ways than meets an infatuated eye.

The human ear lobe may be Nature’s first body part which has evolved only to be custom-tooled.

What it looks like when hips are swapped for pecs, hindfins become forefins, and vents really become ventral.

In our determination to see a pouched felid, have we overlooked an even more gripping dentition?

Is a woman’s peniform the sole organ of erotic dedication – or an essential feminine multitasker?

If we survey the native faunas of the archipelagos of the world, it is birds rather than mammals that have, in general, succeeded on small patches of land isolated by sea. At first glance, this is unsurprising because the birds – or at least their ancestors – could have flown across the water…

Amputating the clitoris is, by any standards, an abuse of the human body. As in the case of a hand amputated, some functions have been lost. But which functions, exactly? The answer ‘sexual pleasure’ is too simplistic. Societies that routinely amputate the clitoris have lost respect for the biological nature of our species…

‘Pinna’ means feather in Latin, and yet it’s mammals, not birds, that have an ear pinna: that auricle projecting from each side of your head. Okay, so no bird has external ears like those of mammals, but is this a biological trivium or a real mind-teaser? The feather is, after all, the definitive feature of living birds…

Mammalogists have no common or vernacular name for one of the most important animal species on Earth, Bos taurus. Why have we failed to name a species we humans ourselves created more than five thousand years ago?