Excerpted from The Universe in 100 Colors: Weird and Wondrous Colors from Science and Nature by Tyler Thrasher and Terry Mudge. September 24, 2024, Sasquatch Books. Published with permission. Despite ...

Zebras, a children’s tale goes, became striped after “standing half in the shade and half out of it.” While the author, Rudyard Kipling, wasn’t a biologist, his story may hold some truth: research ...

From velvety purples to fiery reds, many people can see a spectrum of vivid colors via the human eye. Others, however, may have limited hue perception due to certain conditions. Animals, on the other ...

A recent study finds that color vision evolved in animals more than 100 million years before the emergence of colorful fruits and flowers. And there has been a dramatic explosion of color signals in ...

Nature comes in a variety of striking colors, but all that beauty didn't evolve for our enjoyment. Conspicuous colors tend to be signals, often helping animals woo mates or warn predators. Yet the ...

We all know what chameleons are capable of: changing into a variety of colors to match their surroundings. They're one of the ...

Color change in animals is a response shaped by evolution. Each species has developed its own method and reason for this ability, like an overreliance on light or temperature cues, or a physiological ...

As much as we like to impose human personalities on our pets, cats are pretty different from us: They walk on four legs, wear fur coats year-round and constantly lick themselves clean. Though we ...

Scientists reconstructed 500 million years of evolutionary history to reveal which came first: colorful signals or the color vision needed to see them. The natural world is awash with color, and many ...