Version history
Corrections stay attached.
A correction creates a new fact version and a public note on the same permanent link. Material can also be withdrawn without deleting its operational record.
Ringed caecilian young eat their mother's skin
An earlier version said milk-like provisioning of young had previously been described only in mammals and a few birds. Comparable nutritive secretions are also documented in some fish, cockroaches and jumping spiders, so the entry now describes the 2024 caecilian finding as the first such case reported in an egg-laying amphibian.
The amphiuma carries an enormous genome
An earlier version gave the two-toed amphiuma's genome as roughly twenty times the human genome in the summary and around twenty-five times in the body. The figure is now stated consistently as about twenty-five times, matching the published DNA content estimate.
The aye-aye taps wood to hear grubs inside
An earlier version said the aye-aye extracts larvae with its fourth finger, and placed the ball-and-socket joint at that finger's base. Both belong to the slender third finger, which does the tapping and the extracting; the fourth finger is the longest and more robust, and is used for other tasks.
The deepest known fish lives near eight kilometres
An earlier version described the Mariana snailfish as the deepest fish ever collected. That held when the species was described in 2017 but was superseded in 2022 by a snailfish caught at 8,022 metres in the Izu-Ogasawara Trench. The entry and the species profile now say which record belongs where.
A beaked whale dived for nearly four hours
An earlier version placed both record dives off southern California. Only the 2,992-metre depth record comes from that population; the 222-minute dive was recorded off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, in a separate tagging study, and both of the longest dives came from a single tagged whale.
Britain's largest eagle was extinct there for decades
An earlier version placed the last known British breeding attempt on Shetland; it was on Skye in 1916, and Shetland is where the last individual was shot two years later. The population figure has also been brought back into line with the cited RSPB estimate.
The common dolphin split, then merged back
An earlier version said the 2016 revision kept a separate Indo-Pacific common dolphin species. It did not: Delphinus capensis was removed entirely, and the long-beaked Indo-Pacific form is recognised as a subspecies, Delphinus delphis tropicalis, within a single common dolphin species.
The Moorish idol is the last of its family
An earlier version placed yellow on the Moorish idol's tail, which reverses the clearest field difference: the idol's tail is black with a pale edge, and the lookalike pennant coralfish's tail is yellow. The summary line also stated as fact that the butterflyfish mimics the idol, which the entry's own text treats as unsettled; the summary now matches.
Eradicating this beetle means felling healthy trees
The US Forest Service page cited here no longer carries the article it was linked for; the address now returns a general index instead. The citation has been replaced with the USDA APHIS Asian longhorned beetle programme page, which supports the same points, and the entry now gives the programme's four-year minimum survey period.
The ptarmigan grows snowshoes each winter
An earlier version said rock ptarmigan are the only birds whose toes are feathered to the claws. Feathered toes are shared by every ptarmigan and are the trait the genus Lagopus is named for, so the entry now says no other grouse has them rather than no other bird.
The thorny devil drinks through its feet
An earlier version put the channels between the thorny devil's scales at about a hundredth of a millimetre wide. Published measurements give roughly a tenth to a quarter of a millimetre for the main channels, with finer sub-channels inside them, and the figure has been corrected.