Scientists sunk a cow into the South China Sea. Then a gigantic animal appeared - BBC Wildlife Magazine

D. rex's fruiting bodies were discovered in the forests of Yunnan Province. (Song et al., Frontiers in Fungal Biology, 2026) Yunnan Province in China is famous for its mushrooms and fungi, but somehow, scientists have only just come across a new species that has rightly earned the name 'king'. Named Dianjunus rex (or D. rex for short), its gigantic, club-like fruiting bodies can grow up to 50 centimeters tall, which is about one and a half feet, or the height of a traffic cone. A researcher holds up two D. rex fruiting bodies to show off their impressive size. (Provided by Indunil Senanayake) But its impressive size is not the only exciting thing about this fungus. Its genes also contain clues about a major moment in the history of life on Earth. Mycologist Indunil Senanayake of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and her colleagues describe the new species in a paper published in Frontiers in Fungal Biology. D. rex is the only known member of its family, Dianjunaceae. "This remarkable species… provides a rare window into the evolution of extreme fungal body forms," says Senanayake.

A colossal prehistoric snake that lived in India about 47 million years ago may have been one of the largest snakes ever to exist. Known as Vasuki indicus, the ancient reptile could have reached an extraordinary 15.2 meters (50 feet) in length, putting it in the same league as Titanoboa, the enormous extinct snake long regarded as the largest ever discovered. The remarkable discovery, described in 2024 in the journal Scientific Reports, came from fossils unearthed in Gujarat, western India. Researchers estimate that Vasuki measured between 10.9 and 15.2 meters (36 and 50 feet) long, although its exact size remains uncertain. Its enormous body and unusual evolutionary history offer a glimpse into a time when giant snakes inhabited the warm, tropical landscapes of ancient India.

The spacecraft delivered materials and equipment for new research studies to the station.

Mud from a fjord shows an Atlantic air pattern brought wetter, colder spells to southern Greenland, a clue to how its ice may fare. Greenland’s ice is shrinking as the planet warms. But in the island’s southwest, rainfall and snowfall have been influenced by the same North Atlantic air-pressure pattern for at least 5,000 years. When that pattern tipped one way, the region turned wetter and colder. The record comes from mud on the floor of a Greenland fjord, and it suggests snowfall, not only temperature, shaped how the area’s ice grew and shrank. It doesn’t yet show how glaciers there will respond to the warming ahead. Johan Faust, a researcher at MARUM, the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen in Germany, led the work with colleagues in Germany, Norway, Denmark and Canada. A seesaw in the airThe pattern is called the North Atlantic Oscillation. It’s the difference in air pressure between a low that sits near Iceland and a high near the Azores, and it’s strongest in winter. When that difference is large, the pattern is in its positive phase. Northwestern Europe and southwestern Greenland both get more rain and snow.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.