Nearly 40,000 years ago, humanity had its best idea to date: transform the age's apex predator into a sociable and loyal ally. Though early humans largely muddled through the first few thousand years ...

A raccoon in a trash can. With dexterous childlike hands and cheeky “masks,” raccoons are North America’s ubiquitous backyard bandits. The critters are so comfortable in human environments, in fact, ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. photoDiod/Shutterstock @zeroXhope/X.com (photoDiod/Shutterstock @zeroXhope/X.com) A new study has raccoon lovers wondering whether ...

Whether it’s your grandpa’s nose, your mother’s eyes, or the chin the entire family share, humans depend on facial features to tell one another apart, to read emotions and intent, and to communicate ...

Raccoons have faces that perhaps only a mother could love, but their features seem to be changing, biologists report. After combing through nearly 20,000 images of the so-called “trash pandas” ...

In Tom Edison’s Shaggy Dog, a short story by Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Edison discovers that dogs are intellectually superior beings. They’re so smart, in fact, that the canines found the easiest possible ...

A surprising discovery has rewritten how cats become house pets, while unexpected and rapid evolution is making red foxes more like dogs. In short: an animal’s path to domestication is very ...

Chickens are by far the most numerous birds on the planet, with a population of around 23 billion. But new research suggests that another species was once a strong contender to become the world's ...

Biologists at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock analyzed images of urban and rural raccoons and found that city-dwelling raccoons have noticeably shorter snouts, a classic marker of early ...