On January 21, 2015 the news broke—an Australian fisherman hooked a "living fossil." Called the frilled (or frill) shark (genus Chlamydoselachus, belonging to Order Hexanchiformes), this creature was thought to be 80 million years old.¹ It looks mighty frightening, but is it truly "prehistoric" and somehow linked to shark evolution?

Clovers come in a wide variety of sizes, and some of them hold interesting surprises. Plant biologists have been studying one trait in particular, and it keeps showing up—or disappearing—in peculiar patterns. Do these patterns illustrate evolutionary changes or does something entirely different switch off this trait?

It has been 28 years since Chernobyl's nuclear power plant suffered a catastrophic meltdown in Ukraine. People are still not permitted to live near it because radiation levels remain dangerous, but plants and animals long ago pioneered the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. A new study revealed surprising hints that certain birds' internal biological tactics cope well with the harmful radiation.

How do fish that can see make the switch to blind cavefish, and should that process really be called “evolution”? This transformation fascinates biologists. Picture the scene—a normal-looking fish lays normal-looking eggs, but its hatchlings look like something from science fiction. Thin, pale-pink skin covers not just their bodies but their shrunken eye sockets as well.