
Dueling Dinosaurs: Context is Key
September 23, 2024
Geologist Eric Roberts pictured with paleontologist Lindsay Zanno. You have a lot of questions about how a tyrannosaur and a Triceratops came to be buried together one day in the Late Cretaceous. So do we. To study ancient animals, paleontologists need expertise in the biological sciences and the geological sciences. This is because fossils are… Read More >

This Tiny Backyard Bug Does the Fastest Backflips on Earth
August 29, 2024
Composite image of a globular springtail jumping. By Tracey Peake, NCSU News Services Move over, Sonic. There’s a new spin-jumping champion in town – the globular springtail (Dicyrtomina minuta). This diminutive hexapod backflips into the air, spinning to over 60 times its body height in the blink of an eye, and a new study features… Read More >

A network dubbed the internet of animals is helping track migrating critters
August 19, 2024
The mini-transmitter on the back of the cuckoo accounts for less than five percent of his body weight. It radios its data every two days for ten hours. Photo: © Natural History Museum of Denmark/M. Willemoes By Morning Edition Hosts The internet of animals, it’s a global initiative to tag, track and learn about animal… Read More >

Tiny Fossils, Big Discoveries
August 8, 2024
Cretaceous Creatures is a public science project that seeks to inspire, educate and collaborate with 8th-grade science students across the state and beyond as they do real science with real fossils. The fossils students are finding are tiny, but their discoveries are big! From 2022-2024, 14,000+ middle school students in North Carolina identified more than… Read More >

Weird Science: Is quicksand something to worry about when exploring eastern North Carolina?
July 24, 2024
Photo: Brendan Landis, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr. By Annette Weston, Public Radio East “It was a staple of many B movies, cartoons, and TV shows in the 60s and 70s; now quicksand appears more often in memes by the 50-something crowd on social media. “PRE’s Annette Weston set out to discover whether quicksand is… Read More >