Field zoology of species not recognised by the standing taxonomies. Reported from the field, on foot, in the rain.
A crate opened in Cochise County in July holds a dried membrane on thirty-one articulated elements. Two laboratories put the collagen between 1874 and 1908, and neither can match it to any bird, mammal or living reptile.
Nineteen men on a krill trawler watched a white object the length of a blue whale lie on the surface of the Southern Ocean without breathing once. The bridge log, four thermal stills and the water temperature are printed here.
Warm rains put dragonflies over eleven sites in the Central Valley this month. Our field correspondent worked the swarms with a hand net and recovered nine machines: 78-millimetre span, 1.9 grams, four driven wings, no maker's mark.
Nineteen months, sixty-three separate records requests, two blinded statisticians. Against park area the clusters reproduce the published atlas almost exactly. Against visitor-hours they dissolve, except at one place where nobody has ever gone missing.
The plotter logged fourteen hours at four-second intervals. At 04:12 the boat came onto a heading and held it, dead straight, for eleven hours. The hauler's fault had been reported in writing and priced at £340.
Of 1,142 recordings collected over eleven years from thirty-one countries, 1,009 are the same 43-second audio file, licensed from a commercial sound library. We geolocated 41 of the remainder and found a source for nine.
A dissolved society's hair cabinet reached this newspaper through a solicitor. Two labs sequenced all 218 samples blind and agree to within one: 141 black bear, 39 farm and domestic animals, 21 human, six not animal at all.
A search volunteer's widow gave us 61 plaster casts and the field cards filed with them. Fifty-four match outsoles you can buy. The most famous was lifted at 13:40 from a track laid before dawn.
Nine charter skippers logged eleven large mid-water targets on one lake in a single season. We asked each of them for the unit model and the build number the log header records. Eight of the nine matched.
We surveyed the sandbar with a total station, borrowed the camera, had its lens measured on a bench, and gave the lot to three photogrammetrists working blind. All three returned a height that depends on a setting nobody wrote down.
A hiker found alive on day four had lain 400 metres inside ground cleared twice. His watch logged altitude and steps throughout. Matched against the teams' GPS tracks, it puts searchers within 90 metres of him, twice.
Fifteen complete files from three coroner areas cover every death since 1971 that a newspaper called spontaneous combustion. All fifteen had an ignition source within two metres. The median gap between fire and discovery is four days.
For forty-four years she telephoned three police stations every Monday at nine and ruled a card for every person lost on the mountain. She was never paid, never held a post, and was wrong once, for thirty-one years.
Eleven years of submissions, read against the form's own version history. A contractor added one menu item in March 2019 to match a neighbouring state. Free-text reports of the same animal, in the same counties, did not move.
With the family's consent and the force's agreement, we have published a complete open case file from 2009. Sixty-one pages are insurance correspondence. Forty-four are annual reviews of one sentence each. The next-of-kin liaison form was signed and never sent.
In 1983 the Ministry of Agriculture sent Royal Marines to Exmoor to kill a beast. They found no tracks and no lairs. Three years earlier a farmer in Glen Affric had already caught one, in a cage baited with offal.
Environmental DNA picks up every animal that has been near the water. We sampled eleven sites across a watershed with a long sighting record. The lab found forty-one vertebrate species. The unmatched sequences turned out to be a vole.
The Tombstone Epitaph really did print the story, on 26 April 1890. We read the original off the microfilm. There is no photograph in it, no reference to one, and no photographer named.
Our correspondent is publishing all 188 pages of his field notebook, including the eleven consecutive nights on which nothing happened. Two witnesses disagree with him about the size. An ornithologist offers two identifications and asked for room to explain both.
Two survey vessels 1.2 kilometres apart logged the same return against a 0.4-knot current. The skipper wrote down five things it could be before she told anyone. Our acoustician has ruled out two and will not rank the rest.
Eleven years of case summaries from a Texas state veterinary laboratory. Eight had advanced sarcoptic mange, which strips the coat, thickens the hide and changes the gait. The ninth is the interesting one, and it is not what anybody hoped.
